Limanora : the island of progress

3 stand of Pro

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LIBRARY

OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

OF

Class

BY GODFREY SWEVEN

RIALLARO: THE ARCHIPELAGO OF EXILES

12°. $1.50

LIMANORA: THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS

12°. $1.50

Q. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

New York and London

LIMANORA

THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS

BY

GODFREY SWEVEN

J AA Id-ro-vAj-vx*
Author of " Riallaro, Thev Archipelago of Exiles"

G. P. PUTNAM^S SONS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

<Jbc UvUichcrbochcr iprcse

1903

COPYRIGHT, 1903

BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

Published, June, 1903

Ube IKnicfeerbocfeer iprcss, IWcw

PREFACE

IT was long before our strange guest could be induced
to continue his narrative. He had seemed to hesi-
tate as he approached the close of his sojourn in the
outer islets of the archipelago. He several times post-
poned the story of his exit from it in the projectile.
And for months he left his history hanging in air, and
the strange coffin in which he had been confined exe-
cuting its parabola from his yacht.

There was some excuse for his delay, for the winter
had fled, and the birds and the flowering trees around
us gloried again in song and colour. He grew restless
as the days lengthened, and could not bear to settle in
our shelter by the fiord. All that we saw of him for
months was his occasional flight from precipice to
precipice above the sombre green of the bush. It was
as easy for him to flit from knoll to knoll as it was for
us to leap a ditch. He had regained his old bird-like
gait, that to us was noiseless. What he fed on came to
be a puzzle, for he seldom joined us now in our meals;
and the old semi-transparency came into his face.

Weeks and weeks together none of us would see
him. Where he went we knew not, nor had we the
heart to follow him and trace his whereabouts. Now
and again he would join one or another of us at our

1 1 58fi9

iv Preface

work, and indicate the direction in which we should
tunnel or dig for the richer layers of wash-dirt. His
instinctive sense of the presence of gold beneath the
surface of the earth seemed to us in our blind groping
miraculous. We never found him mistaken in his in-
dications. But we felt it a kind of desecration to ask
him to condescend to such base and trivial pursuits as
the research for wealth. At times his absence was so
prolonged that we thought he had vanished back to
the ring of mist, whence he had come. But a great
storm always brought him to our huts again.

The summer waned into autumn, and the days began
to narrow down. Blasts from the south grew keener;
and his flight from us was more circumscribed. We
saw him almost daily. When the winter nights began,
he gave himself up again to memory. He drew to-
wards us in sympathy, and there were in his narrative
fewer and fewer reserves. His English became fuller
and more exact, though time and again he stumbled
over thoughts too subtle to transfuse into so rough and
materialistic a language. Our own interpretations of
his descriptions must often have been mistaken, we are
certain, and many passages we have had to omit be-
cause of manifest ambiguity or mistiness of expression.

GODFREY

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

PREFACE iii

GLOSSARY vii

I.— MY AWAKENING i

II.— MY EDUCATION 15

III.— SLEEP, REST, AND FLIGHT 25

IV.— HERMITRY 35

V.— JOURNEY TO THE VALLEY OF MEMORIES . .51

VI.— FIALUME 63

VII. — LEOMARIE 88

VIII.— RIMLA 99

IX.— OOMALEFA 112

X. — THE FIRLA, OR ELECTRIC SENSE . . .133

XI.— A CATASTROPHE 149

XII.— OOLOREFA . . ... . . . 162

XIII.— THE IvILARAN 174

XIV. — CHOKTROO 192

XV. — THE DUOMOVAMOLAN OR COSMOPHONE . .219

XVI.— THEIR HEAVEN AND THEIR HELL . . . 230

XVII.— MY EDUCATION CONTINUED 244

POSTSCRIPT 283

GLOSSARY

AII.OMO — The astrobiological families.

AIROI,AN — A sensometer, or instrument for finding the per-
sonal equation of a man.

AifCUROivAN — Radiographic cinematograph; an instrument
combining microscope, camera in vacuo, and electric
power.

AivFARENE— Oxygen shrub.

AMMERUN— Historoscope.

CIRAI^AISON — Museum of terrors.

CivEVAMOi,AN— Combination of telescope and makrakoust, or
distance-hearer.

CUMOI^AN— Earth-sensor.

CUROLAN— Instrument that combines electro-microscopy and
photography.

CUROI,ANIC — Infinitesimally microscopic.

COREAI,EENA — Vacuum-engine car.

DOOMAI<ONA — The hill of farewells.

DUOMOVAMOI,AN— Instrument that interprets the music of the
cosmos.

ERFAI,EENA — Anti-gravitation flight-car.

FAI^EENA— Ship of the air.

FARFAI,EENA— Electric faleena.

FAROSAN — Arotn a-recorder.

FIAI^UME — The valley of memories.

FII,AMMU — The will-telegraph.

FIRI.A— The electric sense.

FIRI,AI,AIN— The firlamaic department of Oomalefa.

FIRI.AMAI — The arts of the electric sense.

viii Glossary

— Belonging to the arts of the firla.
FIRI.AMAN— A musical instrument that appeals to the firla.
FLORAMO— The botanical families.

FIXJRONAI, — The tree of life.

FRAI,OOMIAMO — The families of pioneers that imagine and

represent the distant future.
GERMABEU, — A tree with fruit that makes the muscles and

cartilage more elastic.
IDIJJMIAN — Electric steriliser.

iDROivAN — Observer and magnifier of electric impulses.
IDROUNASAN— Machine-reporter of the thoughts and feelings

and words of an assembly.

IDROSAN — Recorder of electric impulses and sensations.
iDROVAMOiyAN — Instrument for at once seeing and hearing at

great distances.
IiyARiME— Edifice devoted to the arts of smell, taste, and sound

combined.

IMANORA — Centennial review of the civilisation and its progress.
IMATARAN — The focusser of history.

INAMAR — Instrument for splitting up light into its constituents.
INASAN — Recorder of luminous impressions.
INDIAN — Measurer of light.
IREUUM — Irridescent metal applicable to all manner of purposes

by the Limanorans.
I/ABRAMOR — Alloy of irelium that sponges up and retains

electricity.
lyABRO^AN— Instrument for drawing electricity from the air

and the clouds.

LA VIDRO I,AN< — Camera-telescope.

LAVOI.AN— Revealer of the inner tissues and mechanism.
LEOMARIE— The science and art of earth-seeing.
LEOMO— The families of earth-seers.

— The earth -perforator.

— The minutest division of time in Limanora.
LII.AMO— The families that watch the security of the island.
LII^ARAN— The storm-cone.

Ivii,ARiE— The science and art of island-security/
LINAMAR— The analyst of sounds.
I/INASAN— Recorder and reproducer of sounds.

Glossary ix

LINOKI.AR— Spectroscopic analyst and recorder of vapours.

lyOOMiAMO — Families of pioneers who imagine and represent
the links that connect the present with the distant future.

LOOMIEFA— The theatre of futurition.

MANORA — Decennial review of the progress made by the people.

MARGOI,— Electric instrument for blending or reducing the
strength of perfumes, flavours, and sounds.

— Edifice for formula-machines.

— Life-lamp for revealing and recording internal pro-
cesses for the use of the eye, the ear, and the electric sense.

MOI/TA— The Ivimanoran measure of infinitesimal length.

MONAI.AN— Electrical distance-analyst.

MORNAI,AN — Time-telescope.

NAROU,A — Dream-stimulants.

OOARAN— Psychometer.

OOAROMO — Psycho-physiological families.

OoiyORAN — The sonarchitect.

OOI.OREFA— The hall of souarchitecture.

Halls of nutrition and medication.
— Instrument for transforming form and colour into
melody.

PIRAKNO — Machine for drawing electricity from space.

PIRAMO— The meteorological families.

RIMLA— The centre of force.

SAI<OSAN— The gustagraph.

SARiFOiyAN— Instrument that interprets for sight, hearing, and
the electric sense the graphic records of the mirlan.

SARMOI.AN — Cosmic barometer.

SIDRAI.AN — Biometer.

SIDRAI,MO— Bio-chemical families.

SIDRAMO— The chemical families.

TERRAI,ONA — The edifice of outlook into heaven and hell.

THINAMAR — Visualiser of sound.

TIRI,EOMORAN— Electric earth-perforator.

TREMOI^AN — Electric clock indicating the changes of electricity
in various parts of the island.

TREVAMOI^AN— Graduated modifier of sound.

VAMOiyAN— Makro-mikrakoust.

— Photo-electric analyser.

ERRATA

Page 31, line 6. For " resistent " read " resistant."
Page 93, line 16. For ''maintained" read "maimed."
Page 155, line 2. For " I that felt " raz</ " Ihad felt."
Page 211, lines 13 and 17. For " somnifractive " read

"somnifactive."

Page 230, line 3. For ' ' onwonted ' ' read ' ' unwonted. ' '
Page 348, last line. For " rareity " read " rarity."
Page 369, line 12. For " amosphere " read "atmo-
sphere. ' '

Page 377, line 5. For " its " read "it."
Page 440, line 17. For " we the saw " read " we saw

the."

Page 465, line 8 from bottom. For "thought" read
"through."

LIMANORA

BOOK I
The Outer or Material Civilisation

UNIVERS

OF

CHAPTER I

MY AWAKENING

I OPENED my eyes in a world no feature of which I
could recognise. Everything around me was of
the most dazzling beauty. The walls and vaulted roof
of the room where I lay gleamed like mosaic- work of
lit jewellery. The floors were duller, and yet shone
with a coloured radiance like that in a dew-belled
meadow under the light of the slant-rayed forenoon
sun. The light broke up in innumerable points and
corners of the roof into a magnificent display of pris-
matic colours, moving and changing every minute.
Yet, with all the marvellous iridescence, there was
sufficient shade in the vault and walls to check the
fiery oppression of the sun. I had dreamt of such fairy
palaces; but the dream had ever been abortive or

2 Limanora

glanced off into something hideous or appalling. Here
was architecture as unlike anything I had seen upon
earth as a dream, and yet it had a grace that no dream
had ever caught.

Nor did I know the material of which this room was
formed. It seemed like ice, yet was never changed by
the fire of the sun. It was capable of being moulded
into the most delicate lace- work, and yet could be
made as massive as marble walls of Eastern palaces
that were built for both pleasure and siege. It was in
portions as transparent as glass, and in others frosted
with wondrous pictures. And how were those count-
less domes and arches and arborescent columns pro-
duced with such ease? How were those airy galleries
hung ? How were those fragrant fountains poised so
nicely that an infant's finger seemed capable of over-
turning them ? Even the gently moving curtains had
the same crystalline character as the walls, now
frosted as by the artist of our winter-mornings, again
goldenly dim, or rainbow-hued.

There was a spaciousness that reminded me of the
colonnaded aisles of our great cathedrals. Was I rest-
ing in one of the temples of the island ? Was I being
consecrated for sacrifice? And yet the dainty warm
nooks, the close-hung curtains, and graceful tapestries
so broke the awe and loneliness of the place as to make
me feel that it was a chamber for a solitary. And I
could look out upon the fields and forests and the far-
stretching sea; for every foot of wall had in it some
transparency that with its landscape stood like a picture
framed in the frosted tracery around it. I seemed
never to reach the limit of these varied perspectives
and distances. I sank back exhausted on my perfumed
couch, then slowly recovered by aid of the sweetness

My Awakening 3

that met my every sense. The fragrance that filled
the room was like that of finest garden flowers, and
kept changing from one lovely variety to another,
never cloying the sense. Around, too, from unseen
sources, floated sweet music, that now swelled into a
chorus, and again fell into angelic softness. Then .a
new sensation came to me; with every breath I seemed
to draw in a subtle nourishment and stimulation to my
senses; every minute added to the renewal of my
strength. And, to increase my delighted bewilder-
ment, I gradually felt a new sense appealed to; every
nerve in my body seemed exhilarated, and I felt
capable of heroic actions. Some magnetic influence
was raying towards me through the atmosphere, and
a dormant electric faculty seemed to be awakened in
my mind and in my body, producing the effect of in-
toxication without its stupor or the numbing of the
moral powers. It was like a beautiful dream without
the helplessness of the dreamer. I felt no delirium or
voluptuous languor from the excitement of the senses.
It all led to spiritual vigour, that would have made the
body its prompt ally.

My renewed energies turned my mind to my strange
surroundings. I wondered where the beings were who
had built this wondrous palace, and were now doubt-
less playing upon my senses. Was it all a dream ?
And had I never been shot into the sea with Noola ?
It seemed as if my inmost thoughts were at once com-
municated to my watchers; for from some direction,
out of some niche or doorway I had not noticed, moved
softly a figure, that, in its muscular breadth, large
head, and springy gait, reminded me of Noola. Upon
the face a smile shone out of unfathomed depths of
thought and sympathy, and yet the lips were close as

4 Limanora

if to forbid speech. It was enough to rest and gaze at
the beautiful expression of the face with its intensity
of love and pity in the eyes. But the features had not
that symmetry of outline which we call beauty in
Europe; and the form was not " divinely tall." The
whole of the attraction lay in the upraying of the soul
into the face. It was like gazing into the limpid waters
of a lake; I tried to give speech to my emotions, but
the hand rose gently to the lips in a gesture that com-
manded silence, then waved over me, and, as I looked,
I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

I knew not how long I had been unconscious; for
when I woke I seemed to be a new man ; every faculty
tingled with energy ; health glowed through my tissues;
I wandered from niche to niche, from arcade to recess;
I climbed the lofty galleries and raised the curtains,
shaking the sweet perfumes from them as they swung in
the air ; I ran from transparency to transparency with
the delight of a child, and gazed through each at the
ever- varying landscapes that stretched outwards to the
sea. Music, distant and entrancing, floated around me
in the air, with variations and cooling bars of silence, so
that it made a subtle ether circumambient rather than
a definite impression on the senses. Under such condi-
tions what could not I do in life ? I remembered the old
weariness and despair that used to cling around me like
a shirt of Nessus even in the morning when I was re-
freshed with sleep, and the clogging humours that used
to retard my most generous or most energetic action.
In my former life I had moved in a clammy viscous
medium that dragged back my most eager faculties.
Now I was built of air, and stirred lightly as air.

What was it that had accomplished this strange
transformation ? I had not felt so in the other islands

My Awakening 5

of the archipelago or even on its seas. I had not been
so exhilarated at my first awaking. How had this
great change come about ? Or was it but momentary,
to pass away like other intoxications and leave ex-
haustion and ache ? I began to be puzzled and to feel
the return of the thought that it was perhaps only a
dream after all. How was I to test the matter ?

Surely I could not have thought aloud. Yet here
from somewhere or other was moving across the floor
the figure that had appeared after my first trance. I
was so awestruck by the noiseless flash of the approach
that I could make no sign of welcome. What could I
say to a being who came so near to what we consider
in the old world the supernatural ? As soon as my
thoughts touched upon the state of my mind and the
circumstances that surrounded me, my host (should I
call him so?) appeared. And, though my senses, I
thought, had acquired preternatural acuteness, not a
sound had I heard of his entrance or of his footsteps
across the chamber.

He seemed to know the perplexity of my thoughts
again, for he advanced with so airy a grace that my
eyes were fascinated by the ease of the motion. And
his words came almost like music; I scarcely considered
what he was saying, so beautiful were the tones and
manner in which it was said. " Come, and I shall tell
you what has occurred," was what I understood. It
was in the primary or simplest vocabulary of Limanora,
the vocabulary that Noola had taught me.

He led me by a covered but transparent way into a
vaulted chamber, that seemed to the other as a cathe-
dral to a chapel; for it was pillared and galleried and
aisled with the most transcendent art. But I was too
interested in the story he had to tell to give way to my

6 Limanora

passive enjoyment of the scene. He motioned me to
ascend with him a platform that rose above us in a
lofty recess at one brightly sunlit corner of the build-
ing. I saw him lean back, and feared that he would
fall to the floor ; but with his motion the rich mosaic of
the platform opened, and a rest rose to meet his body
which was of the same alabaster-like texture as the
curtains and seemed to shape itself to every curve and
bend of his figure. He stretched out his hand towards
me, and before I knew what he had done I was resting,
in an attitude not far from the upright, on a soft ma-
chine like his own. He showed me how to control this
by a knob under my right hand, and then together we
flew to the ceiling and back, wheeled round, swung
gently in the air, or remained still. It moved like a
thing of life in sympathy with every desire; a slight
change of the position would relieve any part of the
body and yet leave all the rest supported; any kind of
motion was accomplished on changing the screw that
lay in the knob. I afterwards investigated the mechan-
ism, and was amazed at its simplicity; a few levers,
cunningly mastering all the various combinations of
motion, turned on or off the force needed for the neces-
sary changes. After a few hours' experience of it, I
could find no comparison in nature but the couch of air
on which the albatross seems to rest as it moves. I
afterwards found that a nice nlanagement of compressed
air was the secret of this wonderful rest that was neither
couch nor chair. As soon as we ceased to use it, it
disappeared as suddenly as it had risen. This ac-
counted for the complete absence of the furniture that
impedes free motion in our European houses and
made me think as I awoke in my chamber of our great
cathedrals with their free floor space.

My Awakening 7

There in mid-air we lightly hung as if resting on
wings; he seemed to know my anatomy and the points
of greatest pressure in any attitude, and controlled both
machine-rests with such adroitness that we swung
hither and thither, changing slowly from the recumbent
to the erect attitude or back again, finding every few
minutes a different point of view of the chamber or of
the landscapes that could be seen through the walls.
But I soon grew oblivious to the beauty that stole
through every sense; my whole consciousness was ab-
sorbed in watching the play of the intelligence on his
face and listening to his narrative. I missed many of
the links in his story, even though he contrived to put
most of it into the primary and secondary vocabularies,
and, where he was compelled to go beyond them, put
so much of his thoughts into his features that I could
almost have gathered it from them. But I saw the
drift of the story, and, when it was over, pieced the
fragments together and found, when afterwards I knew
the language and the civilisation better, I had missed
little of the real meaning. I give it, then, as if it were
in his own words, although my intelligence seemed to
stumble at every step in it.

" You wonder at your hospitable reception. But you
will not wonder when you know the change in the con-
dition of our knowledge since Noola was exiled. He
was unhurt by the ricochet of the missiles on the beach.
In the darkness they were ill-aimed, and, though they
struck in sand, they were shattered by the impact and
recoiled from the shingle underneath. He disentan-
gled himself from the wreck and rescued you. But
soon the watchers by the storm-cone were down on the
beach and carried you to our house, whilst they led
your comrade to another. You were each examined

8 Limanora

by the wise men and the medical families. Your
faculties and emotions and tendencies were all tested,
and their various strengths measured by means of the
different kinds of cerebrometers whilst you slept. Since
Noola was exiled a hundred years ago, our knowledge
of the brain and the nerves and their various functions
has been applied in the most practical way to the art of
living. Every curve and convolution of the controlling
instrument of the body has its value and meaning tabu-
lated. Every action, thought, and emotion has had its
physical symbol and locality fixed; and the minutest
change in the strength of any one of these points in the
brain or in the nervous system can be discovered by
applying one of the cerebrometers. You will know
what these are some day; but it is enough to say that
they can measure, by means of a delicate apparatus
controlled by electricity, the amount of force that exists
in any living tissue; there is a separate kind for each
portion of the brain and each nerve section of the
trunk, and it will move only when near that portion
or any living tissue that has similar properties and
powers. Our own magnetic sense, which has greatly
developed since Noola' s banishment, can roughly gauge
the relative strengths of the various faculties and emo-
tions in any man; and it is deeply thrilled when any
thought or passion is energising in his nature. But it
cannot accurately measure the strength, as these in-
struments can. We can absolutely trust them, in test-
ing the character of any human being.

" Noola fully expected to be thrust back, unless he
came across his own relations and friends, to whose
pity and sympathy he might appeal. He trembled in
alarm when he was led to the chamber in which he was
to be tested. But it was found that, though his hu-

My Awakening 9

manity had not progressed in the lines or with the
rapidity that the L,imanorans have developed since his
departure, all the atavistic taint had disappeared from
his nature, and the weak elements of his system, love,
pity, tenderness, sympathy, had greatly strengthened.
He could no longer by any possibility side with the
warlike and revengeful in human nature.

" But even if he had only kept the evil qualities in
abeyance, in the state they showed before his exile, we
should have let him return ; for with his strong de-
sire to keep pace with our advance and his regret for
his retrogression, he would have gladly submitted
himself to our new creative surgery. Our increased
knowledge of the functions and constitution of the
brain and nervous system enables us to reduce or ex-
cise any portion that interferes with the development
of the individual. And we can also stimulate or retard
the activity of any part by placing the patient in any
of our medicated atmospheres specially adapted to his
circumstances, and making him breathe in the element
required by his system.

" Noola is now supremely happy in the confidence
that he is to be allowed to remain. Every defect in
his system has been tested and measured, and he knows
how far he has fallen behind our race. He would have
accepted any conditions, and in order to overtake us is
willing to enter upon a new education, — the abbrevia-
tion of the slow and painful advance of many ages into
the hurried pace of a few years. He wishes, though
three hundred years of age, to become a child again
and return to his first century. But his long and painful
self-discipline in Broolyi has shortened the process;
and he will soon be able to keep step with his old com-
rades. He will be aided in every way by the wise men,

io Limanora

some of whom will give their best wisdom and energies
to him. All the physical arts we have will be brought
into play to shorten his term of probation, our creative
surgery and medicine, our arts for the development of
tissue and nerve, our magnetic arts for the development
of the senses, and our ethical arts for the development
of the spiritual sensitiveness.

"For yourself he has pleaded, and, though our wise
men have recognised that you are thousands of years
in the rear of our civilisation, and have confirmed their
recognition by scientific measurement of the forces and
elements in you, they have consented to let you remain
and to take your education in hand. It seems an
almost impossible task to contract thousands of years
into tens; but they do not despair; for our system of
education has already accomplished this for children
born amongst us, and you have a nature peculiarly
open to our educational influences. You have first of
all the passion for progress as strongly in you as in any
of ourselves; and this is the prime essential of our
ethics and civilisation; to it all other passions must
yield; from it flows all that subdues the material world
and gives dominance to the spirit, and makes for
righteousness. But with it often go pride and arro-
gance. In you was found strongly developed the desire
to treat all good men as equals, whatever difference of
capacity or position or possessions might seem to sepa-
rate them from you. Had you had even the slightest
tinge of contemptuousness or hauteur in you, you
would have been sternly repelled. To contemn is the
mark of an incurably savage nature, a nature incapable
of true knowledge of itself and of its relations to life.
From these two desires come purity of thought and life,
the love of peace, respect for the rights of others and

My Awakening n

reverence for what is fine in their personality, and abso-
lute transparency of nature. This last we ever take to
be the shortest and truest test of a progressive charac-
ter, the love of truth and simplicity, complete harmony
of word and act with the inmost thought. As long as
a man or a nation lacks this, there can be no real ad-
vance; what seems advance is but a mirage of fame or
glory. Accuracy of vision and of prevision is the first
condition of true progress. It was one of the first
things that Noola saw in you, and the first reason he
urged for your retention; you had no desire to conceal
your thoughts, so closely did they tally with your life;
you had an overwhelming passion for truth and for the
truthful.

"There was no need to distrust his assertions for
we all felt how genuine he had become; and even sick
and unconscious as you were, our magnetic sense told
us that his description of you was correct. But it has
become the custom to test scientifically the nature of
every inhabitant of our island every week, and also at
every crisis in his nature or in the history of the com-
munity, in order that any incipient defect may be at
once remedied, and that drastic applications may never
be needed. A complete survey of your character and
faculties and corporeal system was the first step towards
your admission into the community. Everything had
to be known, in order that your education should be
mapped out. And the cerebrometers gave us a favour-
able report of you. Your body and your working
faculties are far in the rear of ours; you lack trans-
parency of tissue, ethereality of motion; the material
side of you is earthy and ponderous. These elements
of retrogression we shall never be able to eject wholly
from your system ; but we shall be able to modify them,

12 Limanora

and in your children and your children's children the
body will keep pace with the spirit. The forwardness
of your emotions, of your soul, is what has drawn us
to you; you love the ideal and imaginative more than
any but one section of our community; and you have
an intermixture of the finer spiritual elements such as
we have either lost or never had amongst us. We hope
to graft your nature upon one of the divisions or castes
of our race and so produce in the next generation a
variety that we need. Your retention has thus been
justified by the highest morality of our civilisation.
We never take any step without reference to the ulti-
mate aims of our progress: so to improve the breed
that our posterity may feel nearer to the highest life in
the universe.

"Your education has indeed already begun. We
have assumed from your highly disciplined and pro-
gressive spirit that you would be willing to submit to
those medical methods that shorten the already abbre-
viative process of education. It is true that these
make an enormous drain upon the physical strength
for a time ; and we prefer the ordinary spiritual methods
of training. But you have gained from the open-air
employments in which you have passed your life great
stores of bodily health and vigour. You are still but a
child. The period of childhood and tutelage extends
with us to the thirtieth, sometimes to the fiftieth, year,
that of youth to beyond the hundredth. At the time
that other men are preparing to die the natural death
of old age, we are just beginning to feel what it is to
live.

" And from some ancestral cause you are developed
beyond your years in some of our ethical lines. You
have reached a humility before the living forces of the

My Awakening 13

universe which is the primary mark of the true governor
of the world. How you have attained so rare a virtue
amidst the pretentious barbarity of civilisation it is not
easy to conceive. There worldliness and arrogance in-
herit the earth, though there are not signs wanting
that they feel the approaching triumph of its true heirs
and mask as the meeker virtues. In older times they
were not ashamed to show themselves as they really
were ; for those were the days of glorified highway-
men who seized the throne of the world. Conquest is
nothing but successful brigandage on a large scale,
veneer it over with diplomacy and historical fame as
you will. But for centuries there has been an uneasy
feeling abroad that the humble must come to their
rights some day ; and so the gilded brigands have allied
themselves with a religion of the meek and despised,
that they may hoodwink mankind into acquiescence in
their ancient dishonesty.

"We banished all the makings of monarchs, aris-
tocracies, and great men at the purifications of our
people. We could see no difference between these and
the worst criminals except one of degree. We meas-
ured their skulls and brains by the rough, unscientific
methods we used to have, and found in them almost no
difference from those of murderers and thieves; and
comparing them with the skulls of savages and of our
own far-back ancestry, we found that in the case of
both heroes and criminals the cause of their likeness
to each other was their recoil upon the footsteps of the
past, and away from the line of human progress which
leads towards harmony with the higher laws of the
universe.

' ' Happily for you every trace of such arrogance and
contempt and ambition is absent from your system.

i4 Limanora

You have nothing merely mimetic in you; you live
unashamed and truthful in presence of all that the
world is capable of being. It is one of the surest signs
of fear of threatening annihilation that a species has to
simulate the appearance or the modes of life of another.
Hypocrisy in the human race, like mimicry in the kinds
of animals and plants, is the brand of feebleness and
the omen of coming decay and subjugation. We use
truth and sincerity as one of the most inward of tests
of a strong and healthy nature. In the olden days, as
in all large and mixed civilisations, it was difficult to
distinguish the imitation virtue from the real, and
when it was discovered it was easy to pardon it and
even accept it as a virtue amid the universal effort at
simulation. But when we had swept out the survivals
of primitive and savage times and the atavistic returns
to them, we found that every need of mimetic virtue
had disappeared. The slightest taint of unreality or
falsehood in any of our community is as offensive as
carrion; we rise in a body and have it removed. And
we have as keen an enjoyment of sincerity and truth-
fulness. Your loyal character at once attracted us to
you; we felt that all germs of moral disease would lose
their virulence within its influence, as germs of physi-
cal disease lose theirs in sunshine."

CHAPTER II

MY EDUCATION

THE strain on my attention had been extreme as I
tried to follow his explanations. It was not
merely the words that were unfamiliar, but the very
manner of the thoughts. I had not felt how exhausted
my tissues were growing, or how soothing was the in-
fluence of the perfumes and soft music. I had been
deeply moved by the joy of my acceptance by this
strange community and by the profound truths woven
into the fabric of its civilisation. Imperceptibly the
mist of dreams stole over me. I was not even con-
scious of the gesture of his hand. I thought that I had
fallen back again into the darkness of Western civilisa-
tion, and yet that my Umanoran guardian was silently
hovering round me, protecting me amid the horrors of
the reality. I seemed to be present at a court scene,
where the monarch and his ablest statesmen and sol-
diers were welcoming a hero back from a victorious
campaign that had added a great province to the
kingdom. There were shoutings and huzzas without,
whilst within strains of triumphant music alternated
with bowings and ceremonies from the gorgeously robed
officials. In some strange way I thought that it was
I who was being lauded. Conscious of the tens of

15

1 6 Limanora

thousands left dead upon my battle-fields, I loathed it
all ; for by some soul-magic, perchance my I^imanoran
influence, the hearts of eulogists and courtiers were
laid bare before my eyes, all (there was not an excep-
tion) black with envy and designings; the king himself
was sick of me and my honours, even as he showered
them on me. I knew the pitfalls and intrigues pre-
pared for me ; I saw the whole mass of humanity, both
lacquered and tattered, that was now cheering, hiss and
groan at me as I fell ; and I turned away from the ap-
plauding crowd and looked into the homes of my dead
soldiers, and I heard the weeping and despair of the
widow with her orphans and the mother bereft of her
children in their prime. Here the depths of sorrow
were its surface too. What was there to my credit in
the book of time ?

Then with sudden transformation I saw the crowd
swaying like billows before the wind; every inch of
space on the floor of the vast cathedral was filled with
an adoring multitude, tears falling from the eyes of
every up-turned face. What could not be done with a
mass of humanity so filled with passion for the highest!
None too large were the vaulted aisles and nave for the
tremulous thunder of the anthem. It seemed as if
the dome of the sanctuary would open and the Deity
would reveal Himself to His rapt suppliants. Then the
music died away and silence magnetised the people
and drew down the influence of heaven upon them.
And it was I that was in the pulpit, seeming a feeble
and sinful thing beside this divinely inspired multitude.
Could I do aught but still their quivering hearts?

With sudden impulse my voice rang out in the
cadences of the great organ as I raised their thoughts
to the cross over the altar where hung the One who

My Education 17

was rejected and despised of men. I painted the
poverty and neglect and scorn of the life of the Man of
Sorrows. They wept as I bent their thoughts to the
weary mission of this lofty spirit amongst men, and
His despair as He saw them turn in contempt from Him.
The death of torture that marked the close of His so-
journ here was as nothing to the crucifixion of the
spirit that He bore each day from the cold neglect or
the supercilious sneer with which His message was met.
None but lowly fishermen would accept His divine
teachings. And never a murmur issued from His lips.
Heart-broken and martyred in soul, the crown of thorns
was a fit close to His career. I seemed to hold the great
assemblage in the hollow of my hand. The sound of
weeping rose, while with love and adoration they
gazed on the crowned agony as it hung on the cross.

Then I blessed the people and left the pulpit, my heart
hard and dry within me, when an alien sound broke
upon my ear from the farther end of the great aisle. A
commotion arose, and before many minutes the whole
mass of worshippers had joined in the passionate dis-
cord. There was a conflict about some centre that was
moving upwards from the door. Before I could regain
the pulpit, a bruised and bleeding body had been raised
above the sea of heads upon a cross against one of the
huge pillars. A cry of execration rose from the whole
church. It was useless to attempt interference, for my
voice could not be heard in the tumult. In a few
minutes the insults and bufferings had accomplished
their work; the wounded, bleeding head sank upon
the breast of the figure on the cross; his spirit had
fled. It was a preaching reformer of the town, who
was accounted a madman for his enthusiasm. He
had fallen into some controversy and had shown his

1 8 Limanora

opponents the gross and material nature of their wor-
ship, insulting to a Deity who was pure spirit ; he had
prophesied the downfall of all their gorgeous churches
and ceremonials, and the substitution of silent reverence
within the temple of the heart. They had taken his
prophesy as an insult to the Christ and His church.
Fleeing to the sanctuary to be safe from the furious
attack of the crowd, they had followed him and with a
few hurried words had enlisted the worshippers within
against the blasphemer. And this had been the result.

As I looked at the blood-stained features, there
seemed to gather round the head a halo of light as of
a crown of thorns. I was struck with a strange re-
semblance and glancing back at the altar, saw the faces
were the same. This passionate devotion to a dead
Christ had found Him in living form and had crucified
Him again.

I was appalled at the thought of all the centuries
having passed for naught. Not one step upward had
been made. No nearer were the multitude to recog-
nising their Saviour when He came in the form of living
man. There seemed to be nothing to live for, if this
were the end of the agonising toil of the ages.

How sweet it was when I awoke to find it was but a
dream, and that I was not in Christendom but in
Limanora ! I was alone, but there was the sense of
comradeship around me. I found afterwards that the
wise men of the medical caste had been electrising por-
tions of my brain as I lay asleep. It was the beginning
of my education, which was to go on even in sleep,
moulding dreams that should modify my whole nature.
Perhaps the most important part of the growth of the
spirit is during the hours of rest, when the past or
future may enter the vacant mind. My imagination

My Education 19

had been sent out on its travels into my past and had
found its way into the heart of Western ambitions and
hypocrisies. Thus the wise men had perceived by
their electric sense the dreams that had oppressed me,
and they drew from them "the master- sorrows of my
past.

Half of the success of education depends upon the
most intimate knowledge of the history of the soul to
be educated, a knowledge more intimate than the soul
itself can have; else the educator will be alarmed and
defeated by the surprises of survivals or resurrections.
It is not the history of the mere incidents of life, of
even spiritual life, from birth that is needed, but the
unrecorded history of the mental and emotional tissues
of a countless ancestry. And no annals could reveal
this so -well as the dream-flashes of the night. They
are brief as the tremors of lightning, but they illumi-
nate a midnight world, a glimpse of which is as great
as an inspiration. " Night is the confessional of the
unknown"; "Sleep unburies the dead"; "Dreams
kaleidoscope the vanished past." These are three of
their world-old sayings, which were striking at first,
but after I knew their exact science of somnology, be-
came as commonplace to me as they were to the
L,imanorans.

This science, like all their sciences, was practical
and but the other side of an art; it was one of the most
helpful auxiliaries of education. It had classified all
types of dreams, and found the inner test of truth in
them. Though seemingly capricious, to these medical
wise men not a dream occurred but had its significance
in the life of the individual. They could touch any
section of the brain tissue into dream-activity during
sleep by means of their magnetic and electric probes

20 Limanora

and stimulators; they could feel by their own electric
sense all that was flashing through the corridors of
sleep; and, with their electrographs could take an exact
image of every portion of the dream.

Dreams, they held, made men children again, with
their souls upon their skins, so absolutely transparent
did they render the nature, so free from convention
and the mask of policy. And what was best of all,
the shadows of the past, at times of the primeval past,
answered to their call and played upon the mind during
sleep. " We are such stuff as dreams are made of"
was a saying of our own far-seeing dramatist's which
often came into my mind as I looked into their som-
nology. Into the making of our bodies and our brain-
tissues go elements from all the ages of our human and
animal past, ages buried beyond the reach of history or
speculation. They enter subtly into the tissue of our
life, though we are all unconscious of the process.
And these elements are the stuff that goes to the mak-
ing of dreams as well. But in the dream-world there
is no central personality, no will to control or trans-
form, no mask to wear, no power to conceal. We are
ofttimes ashamed of our dreams because they are so un-
consciously naked in their savagery or even animality.

Nor is it an uncommon or unnatural thing that
dreams foreshadow incidents in the after-life of the in-
dividual ; for they bring into play elements in his
nature that he has never been conscious of and whose
existence he would stoutly deny. Then, when the
favouring circumstance or set of conditions brings these
elements into action, he is startled to remember how
close the long-forgotten dream had come to the un-
imagined reality. If only he had known how much it
liad meant, as it entered on the theatre of sleep and

My Education 21

then vanished, he might have been forewarned and
have avoided the opportunity for its reappearance on
the stage of life.

And the Limanoran medical sages had taken ad-
vantage of this prophetic provision of nature. They
systematically tested every fibre and cell of the brain
of each individual they had to educate and develop,
and without hesitation or error found out every pos-
sibility of his nature. They tested and tabulated the
results of every electric stimulus and every dream that
followed it, and by this means had a complete natural
history of all his ancestral past. No revolution could
happen in the state of any Limanoran, nothing of what
we mean by conversion. It has sometimes been said in
the science of the West that there are two brains or
physical organs of soul in every man, and this explains
the strange actions and reactions, conversions and re-
coils that so often occur in life. But it is far truer that
there are a hundred brains in every man, and that his
brain is composed of elements out of all his ancestry,
even his far-back animal ancestry; and it all depends on
the stimulus which of those brains or ancestral brain-
elements will come uppermost. The Limanorans had
millions of sun pictures of their own exiles and of the
various peoples of the rest of the world in innumerable
attitudes and situations, and with expressions on their
faces unconsciously worn ; and they could point out
in each the predominating animal. In going over the
memories of the men and women I had known I could
recall times when the look of some animal had come
out strongly on their faces. I had had, to my mis-
fortune, much acquaintance with the serpent nature,
the most predominant in an unwisely progressive civili-
sation like that of Western Europe where convention

22 Limanora

and custom and law become the opportunity and the
mask of characters fallen far into the rear of progress.
When laggard natures are not monasticised and pre-
vented from breeding, a progressive people get overrun
with hypocrisy; under convention and custom and law
they take shelter and there is no power that can drive
them out; the finer phases of civilisation, industry, art,
learning, speculation, morality, religion, become their
nesting-ground. At last the serpent nature is accepted
as the type, provided there is not too fatal a sting in it.
The religious legends mirror this serpent-like develop-
ment. The serpent is the spirit of evil which caused
their degeneration from the godlike. The serpent they
see everywhere, even when it has disappeared from
their own land. Their greatest successes in any sphere
are by means of serpent-like subtlety, whilst they still
profess to worship the ideal of truth and candour aban-
doned by them in the far past. In practice it is the
qualities of the serpent they embody and develop ; in
theory they worship its foe and conqueror.

The lyimanoran sages explain this reappearance of
animal natures in human civilisations and individuals
by showing how the elements of all exist in infinitesimal
germ in the most primitive form of animal life; as this
crept up the scale, certain elements grew stronger and
led to new species still retaining the others in subordi-
nation; at each higher and higher division of the vital
way the elements became more vigorous and more dis-
tinct in their characteristics; it is therefore traces of
the higher animals that are most apt to appear in man.
And the only means of ridding these of their retrogres-
sive influence is to make the newer and higher spiritual
qualities more dominant. The first rule of a civilisation
that means to advance in reality and not in mere ap-

My Education 23

pearance is to monasticise all atavistic natures and pre-
vent them from handing on their retrogression to a
posterity; the second is to encourage only the higher
and more spiritual features of those that remain.

It took many months to examine and catalogue my
powers and tendencies. I often awoke unconscious or
with a confused recollection of the dreams they had
stimulated and recorded. The first few were most dis-
tinct, and seemed to follow me when I waked with the
reality and perspective of life. But I could not interp/et
them; they seemed fanciful and capricious, and when I
puzzled over them, yielded nothing. And yet, when I
saw my dream-confession and autobiography, I was
startled with the truth of its great features; thoughts
that I had never uttered to mortal ear were there; words
that had been spoken in the secrecy of confidence far off
in my village home were recorded; actions light and
insignificant had their due place, and seemed to have
new and infinite meaning in their new setting. So
circumstantial were the details of much of my past life
and character that I could not but accept the rest as
absolute truth. And what a strange array of facts it
was! Parts of my immediate ancestral history I knew,
more I had conjectured, some I could never have
guessed at ; but here it was spread out as on a map,
with every new advance or retrogression any progenitor
had accomplished or suffered. I seemed to see my
inner nature photographed and by the light of a magic-
lantern.

At first, when I saw it stand out detail after detail in
lifelike truthfulness, I felt in the presence of some
supernatural power. But when I came to know the
methods they had employed, it seemed as simple as a
child's puzzle. Every conclusion had been reached in

24 Limanora

the most scientific way. All the minutiae of every
dream had been faithfully recorded and microscopically
examined. Then they were tabulated and compared
with the most untiring industry. And out of the
shapeless mass had come by the aid of their logical
methods or dream-tests the clear, unquestionable truth.
Their brilliant, but by no means reckless, imaginations
did the rest, evolving order and lifelikeness out of
seemingly barren and confused facts. It is true, they
did not make any attempt at the chronology of the
past; they had been able only to group the facts in
great spaces of time, and in a certain order of develop-
ment. Their minute knowledge of the evolution of life,
and especially of human life, gave them the framework
for this grouping. I was astonished at the quickness
of their work, when I considered the fulness of the
natural history of my mind and character; it seemed
as if they should have taken years and not months to
investigate with such care every atom and cell of the
tissue of my brain.

CHAPTER III

SLEEP, REST, AND FLIGHT

I COULD not but surrender myself into the hands of
men whose wisdom seemed to me to approach om-
niscience; and this I was the more inclined to do that
I felt, instead of exhaustion from their operations on
my brain during sleep, the greatest sense of exhilara-
tion I had ever experienced in my life. They acted
on the principle of giving complete rest to one set of
nerves and tissues by stimulating the others. They
could produce the deepest sleep in all the brain- and
nerve-centres by gathering the life-energy that remains
during sleep into one minute point, which they stimu-
lated by magnetism.

They smiled' at the clumsy methods of resting that
Western civilisation had adopted, the awkward, un-
yielding beds and chairs and sofas, and the wasteful
and futile attempts at exercise that were meant to give
rest. Ages ago they had banished dancing and all
corybantic amusements as extravagant waste of tissue,
destroying a hundred cells or nerves for every one that
they saved or invigorated. All frantic and violent ex-
ercise encouraged the animal part at the expense of the
progressive: it mangled and rent the delicate tissues
of the brain and heart, and sent the currents of suste-
nance into the muscles and bones of the legs and arms.

25

26 Limanora

The riding and hunting and athletics of the aristocracies
only helped the animal to persist, and clearly identified
their ancestry with the conquering nomad hordes that
swept down on the peaceful plains and destroyed primi-
tive civilisations. Exercise, they held, should help, on
the one hand, to increase the store of energy to be
transformed into the higher elements, and on the other
to rest the spiritual forces and faculties.

Rational rest was one of the great secrets of the pro-
longation of life. There was a latent passion in living
things for rest: and this rose to its highest in man. To
balk it was to shorten the career of all the powers. And
they had set themselves to understand this passion and
the methods for its satisfaction as one of the first duties
of an advancing people. They knew that there never
could be any complete rest for a living system short of
death. Even in the soundest sleep the functions pro-
ceeded, though feebly, and there was a misty conscious-
ness of existence; else it would lapse into annihilation.
They realised that they must provide for many grada-
tions of rest between the edge of death and the border-
land of full activi ty . Nor should any portion or element
of the human system go long without its period of rest
and its period of exercise.

On these principles they built their methods of alter-
nating rest and activity, all duly subordinated to their
great aim, — the advance of the higher' nature. The
only reason for muscular pursuits was that the intellect
and the imagination might be relaxed and the higher
energy reinforced. Even the loftiest thought resulted
in certain waste products, that, if left to accumulate,
would soon clog and stifle it. This waste must be car-
ried off by reposeful exercise of the lower and more
physical organs. All the lower elements which remain

Sleep, Rest, and Flight 27

to mingle with those of a higher plane after they cease
to be needed as regenerators of energy grow at once
poisonous and must be removed by exercise.

For many months I occupied one of their beds, half
hammock, half framework, made of soft, flexible stuff
that looked like metal, yet yielded like down. These
beds were hung not only at the four corners, but along
the two sides, so that the body lay in a kind of groove;
yet, by a second series of rests, the material was kept
from contact with the sides of the body or from any
pressure upon it. Within this groove was laid an air-
cushion of still softer and more elastic material, which
fitted itself to every irregularity of the body and to its
various changes of position. The pillow was of the
same soft network, and so shaped as to fit the head. I
afterwards found that through the whole fabric of the
pillow passed a mild current of positive electricity, that
drew the energy from the nerve-centres of the head,
and soothed every tissue to rest. The framework of
the lower portion of the bed was charged with the
mildest currents of negative electricity, and thus the
circulation and the life were kept up, however deep
might be the sleep. The sense of exhilaration and re-
plenished stores of energy with which I rose each
morning was enough to make me enamoured of life.
Day by day I grew lighter in step, and seemed to walk
and rest on air. It was the grosser particles of my
system that were being withdrawn from it by this
nightly process of rest. I gained energy and lost
weight till I felt that I could soon rise on wings. I
noticed before long that I had acquired the tripping,
elastic gait that I had remarked in Noola. My move-
ments and footfall came to leave almost no impression
on my senses, and I could have played the ghost with

28 Limanora

appalling effect in the superstitious atmospheres of my
native land. I did not seem to grow much smaller in
bulk ; yet in a year or more I must have weighed one
half what I did when I arrived. Whether they applied
some other degravitating process to my bones and
tissues besides the magnetic sleep I never ascertained.
But they had the power of reducing their own weight
considerably in a few moments. It seemed as if their
bones were hollow like those of birds; for I could lift
even the largest of them with my one hand; and they
had some reserve store of an element lighter than air
in their bodies, which they could increase and dis-
tribute over their system at will. When they were
asleep I found I could raise them as lightly as a feather,
but when awake they could, whether by muscular
effort or by some other process of their bodies, prevent
me lifting them even the fraction of an inch from the
ground. They seemed able at a thought to increase
their weight tenfold, and though they had wonderful
strength of muscle, I am certain that was not all, for I
observed they made little use of it on such occasions.

It can be easily imagined then how little friction
of the body there was during sleep; indeed, they never
moved whilst resting, for there was no need of relieving
the tension of any part. I enjoyed still more another
kind of rest they had ; it was half chair, half bed, and
consisted of an incline of the softest netting made out
of their usual metal and in such a way that the body
could not collapse when loosed in sleep. Even pleas-
anter was the swing-sleep; here a huge magnet kept
the supple incline gently swaying whilst at the same
time it drew the blood from the head. The float-rest
was as pleasing; in this the head rested on a floating
pillow whilst two air-cushions stretched along one side

Sleep, Rest, and Flight 29

of the body and supported it on a network held between
them. But the most complete of all rests was that in
which the Limanorans were supported in the air by a
cloud of sweet-scented and wholesome gas blown from
innumerable jets with steady power; electric fences
kept it from spreading into the atmosphere around. I
never reached that power of reducing myself in weight
so that I could enjoy this rest. It needed fine skill
of poise to climb to this bed and remain there, and
I was ever afraid of falling.

The same physical incapacity prevented me from
reaching the most graceful and soothing of all their
combinations of exercise and repose. This was the
wing-rest. I had often seen the albatross, as it followed
in the wake of our yacht, swoop down and float up the
curves of the wind without apparent effort, its broad
wings motionless but for occasional adaptation, like
sails, to the changes in the strength or direction of the
breeze. I had never expected to see human beings
master this bird-power over the air; but it became the
commonest sight in the breezes of the dawn and the
sunset to see old and young of both sexes in Limanora
fasten great wings to their arms and feet, and, charging
their small wing-engines with new stores of energy,
sail up underneath the chameleon clouds, and float
hither and thither like spirits of the storm. This was
part of their night's rest and their morning's exercise;
and they used to descend from it with heightened
colour in their cheeks and the look of profound repose
in their eyes. The long training they had had from
youth in the management of their wings and in gauging
the force and current of the winds had made their skill
and knowledge habitual, if not instinctive. They could
shut their eyes and rest their intelligence as they floated

30 Limanora

up and down the levels of the breeze; their wings
seemed to be at peace. I can find no analogy in my
own experience for their delight in the swift-curving
movement but my youthful enjoyment of skating before
the wind for miles over clear ice. It was a gladness
merely to watch them sport amid the rays of the grow-
ing or lessening sun. Often would they time their
movements to some rhythm, and flash through intricate
evolutions like rooks in the evening air. Again half
of them would fold their wings and be borne by the
other half with a speed and lightness almost as great
as when flight was unburdened. All mere earthly
amusements and exercise had ceased when the secret
of flight had been mastered.

For generations their biologists, anatomists, and
physicists had studied the wing-power of animals with
a view to the practical mastery of it for the Limanorans
themselves. Their chief guide towards the analysis
was the study, not of birds or insects, but of the bat.
They measured the force of the strong chest muscles
that enabled it to move its wings with such rapidity;
this could be done to a nicety by means of their refined
instruments for gauging latent power, whether in
tissue or nerve or muscle. They calculated the num-
ber of beats it could make in a minute. They measured
the spread of the wings and the weight of the body.
Thus they came to an almost constant equation of
wing-power to size and weight. The physicist and
mechanic were then called in; but they would have
been helpless without the new metal, irelium, and their
power of concentrating great power into small space.
This metal was extracted by a process from common
earth, but could also be found pure some miles down
in the earth. It was perhaps the first essential to the

Sleep, Rest, and Flight 31

rapid advance of their civilisation because of its extreme
lightness and strength, and still more its wonderful
flexibility and elasticity when mixed with certain pro-
portions of other substances. It could be made into
the most delicate membrane, fine as gauze and yet
tough and resistent as leather. It formed the material
of their most massive engineering works, and of their
lightest draperies and garments. Nothing could sur-
pass its adaptability to all purposes of civilisation.

It was out of this that they were able to make their
wings which seemed so fragile and yet could bear the
force of the wildest storms. It would stand stiffly on
its framework against the strongest pressure, and yet
could be expanded balloon-wise from within. The
only means of disabling these wings was perforation by
a hard, sharp point. This could never occur in the air
except from the beak of a bird; and then they could
still use their spread as a parachute to break their de-
scent. Another quality this metal had was its trans-
parency, and their flight was somewhat concealed from
the sight of gazers below by the colour they took from
their atmospheric surroundings; it was difficult to dis-
tinguish them from a floating cloud or a darker patch
of grey or blue sky. The wings could be easily folded
or expanded, so flexible was the material; and, when
the L,imanorans landed from their flight, scarcely a
minute elapsed before the huge sails, framework and
all, had been furled and had disappeared in the ordinary
outline of their bodies.

And these bodies differed as much as their natures
from those I had been accustomed to see. They were
short and squat; and this, with their broad chests, great
heads, and long arms, would have led Europeans to
call the lyimanorans gnomes. Muscles and bones that

32 Limanora

in other men had been of little importance had grown
into what we should have called abnormal size and
strength*. But after I had met the power of their eyes
and felt the beauty of the natures that shone in their
faces, their bodies seemed to me the normal garment
of the highest human spirits ; and I came to under-
stand the high purpose of every change they had
brought about in their forms and features. Without
their broad chests they could never have had such ex-
pansible lungs or such powerful heart-action essential
to easy flight, as well as to the lightning sweep of their
thoughts and energies and the rapid advance of their
civilisation. The pulse could be seen in many parts
of the body, it was so strong; and its beats were twice
as frequent as in my own. The great heat of summer
was to them little inconvenience; they could thrust
their arms into what seemed to be boiling water with-
out shrinking; and they could bear a degree of cold far
below the lowest temperature I had ever felt, for the
high temperature of their bodies made them capable of
enduring far greater extremes of climate than any race
I had ever known or heard of. But their breathing
was much less frequent than mine; they seemed to
take in enormous draughts of air at each inspiration
and to retain stores of it in their system. They con-
tinued at their ease in difficult atmospheres and exer-
tions long after I had begun to pant and gasp for
breath. The spaces within their bodies that had once
been wholly filled with the organs of digestion and dis-
charge had evidently been largely utilised for their
marvellous expansion of lungs and heart.

Another purpose that their huge chests served was
to bear the strain of the great muscles that controlled
their arms, and of the powerful engines that, strapped

Sleep,. Rest, and Flight 33

on to them, gave the strong and swift beat to their
wings. Their arms were moulded on lines of similar
strength ; for they had to bear the strain of the forward
stroke of the wing, whilst also having to manipulate by
means of the long and sinewy fingers its great folds in
the backward sweep; and, when more expanse was
needed during calmer weather or when resting in the
sky, the arms had to thrust out and to bear long rods that
in their turn bore expansions of the wings like the stud-
ding-sails of a ship. The thumb of each hand was kept
free for the management of their breast and shoulder-
engines; and it had become by exercise more vigorous
and more flexible than the ordinary human thumb. In
each armpit was carried a small engine that could be
used either as subsidiary to the great breast- engine or
for the partial or complete furling of the wings. Beside
it was a storage-battery, in which could be generated by
the movements of the arm more electricity to supply the
central power, thus enabling them to extend their flight
through long periods. If they became tired they could
expand and inflate their wings with a gas made much
warmer by the heat of their bodies than the surround-
ing atmosphere ; then throwing themselves on their
backs they could rest or rise in the air as on a balloon.
In slow or ordinary flight, or when the wind was not
high, they could steer themselves rudely by manipu-
lating the outer folds of their wings with their fingers.
But if they wished to fly swiftly, or in some other
direction than the wind would bear them, they could
push out a tail-like membrane of irelium from between
the feet and move it hither and thither by the sinewy
power of the heels. The great toe of each foot was
also much developed by long use for stretching out and
managing the wings; it had become more like a thumb,

34 Limanora •

capable of seizing and manipulating cords or mem-
branes. It was this, added to the lightness of their
bodies, that gave them their springy gait, and made
them seem when they walked as if they scarcely touched
the ground; they could skim like a bird close to the
earth by using. only the outer folds of their wings and
the tip of the great toe for propulsion.

Much though my weight was reduced, and ardent
though I was in my attempts to come up with their
mastery over the air, I was seldom able to do more
than quicken my pace in running and rise in short,
clumsy, laboured flights on their wings like a callow
nestling fallen from its nest. I was soon exhausted by
my efforts, even when aided by my ultimately deft
management of the breast-engine and the shoulder-
engines; for my lungs were short of compass, my
heart soon beat too rapidly for the strength of its tis-
sue, and my arms and fingers and great toe soon grew
weary of the work they had to do. Nothing but the
selection and adaptation of my ancestry could have
made me capable of progressing physically to their
level. Their past had been a rapid and deliberate
process of adjustment to new and higher ideas of life,
one of the main aims being this new mode of locomo-
tion in order to give them command of a sphere that
other men had abandoned to the birds and insects;
for it was but one of the corollaries of the great pur-
pose of their existence, which was to master or eject
the grosser elements of their system, that they might
rise into a more ethereal or spiritual life. By the
power of flight they seemed to gain independence of the
earth, greater freedom of movement, and an approach
to that frictionless, untrammelled motion through
limitless space which thought gives a foretaste of.

CHAPTER IV

HERMITRY

FLIGHT was one of their best methods too of
achieving complete solitude. One of the early
discoveries of this people in the art of progress was
that, where men are too much or too long together,
they confirm each other's faults and clog advance; the
weaker and more superficial ambitions get the mastery
and force energy into mistaken directions. The risk
of this grew less as the individual grew older; for he
receded farther and farther from the ancestral stages
of life through which he must pass in youth and early
manhood; and he came to have less desire and less
need for intercourse with his fellows. Complete love
of solitude and capacity for solitude were two of the
signs of the perfecting of the individual life; thereafter
death, the rending of the veil that divides the seen
from the unseen, was the most natural step in develop-
ment, and scarcely needed effort. They held solitude
as much one of the essentials of noble life as society;
and the latter needed no stimulus; by nature and be-
ginnings man was a social animal, but only some strong
impulse would make him seek the companionship of his
own thoughts. The final triumph of life was to be able
to be confidently alone, to stand with the highest man

35

36 Limanora

can think and feel against the herded universe. Under
the stimulus of the more physical and primary passions
it is the universal instinct to flock together. The baser,
the more destructive feelings are gregarious.

To ensure periods of solitude for each member of the
community, every man and every woman had a separate
house, as soon as the powers were mature. One of the
horrors of the past out of which they had come was the
intrusion of friends and relatives every hour of the day,
and the irritating sense of the continually watchful eyes
of servants or slaves. Only by seeking the wilds could
one find real solitude. In all human communities
there are endless opportunities for social intercourse;
opportunities for solitude are artificial. Life was ar-
ranged in Limanora with a view to allowing and secur-
ing as frequent and as long solitudes as were consonant
with the progress of the race. On the most prominent
point of every house there was the representation of
two climbing flowers; and if these hung drooping,
colourless, and apart, everyone knew that the occupant
desired seclusion; if they flushed with rose, stood up to
the sun, and twined round each other, then was it
known that human converse was permissible, if not
desired.

There was indeed sufficient magnetic communion of
spirit among all the people to touch into life at inter-
vals the love of that definite and open intercourse so
native to the human system. This inborn social faculty
might be trusted to prevent the love of loneliness from
severing all ties. There were daily public duties that
brought everyone into the knowledge and sight of his
fellow-men, the rota of physical exercise at the centre of
force, the flight-drill, the general meeting of the com-
munity, and the medical review. And every day and

Hermitry 37

almost every hour of the day communion of spirit could
go on in the magnificent baths, in the halls of recupera-
tion, and in the valley of memories. There was no
lack of occasion to draw the Limanorans together.

But the other duty to the higher self was sacredly
guarded and fostered, especially in the earlier stages of
life. One of the greatest blunders they had to correct
in their former civilisation had been gregarious educa-
tion. Large families had been one of the consequences
of a half-developed humanity, more kin to the animal
world than to the spiritual. The lower a living thing
is in the scale of life the more prolific it is, the more
devoted to the mere function of keeping its species
alive. Unicellular organisms perpetuate their exist-
ence by continual fission. Microbes become massive
in their effects by the countless myriads each is capable
of producing. The higher the organisation, the less
is the energy that can be spared for generation, and
the more capable is the offspring when matured of en-
suring its own survival, of rising above and managing
the laws of nature. Civilisation has not advanced far
when it acts by masses and needs masses to keep it
going. Then mere subsistence and procreation are
the only purposes and functions of most life. To feed,
to reproduce, to die, that is their history.

The L,imanorans looked back to that stage of their
development with a shudder, so far in the mists and
darkness of animalism did it seem. Now one man of
them was more able to do battle with nature and her
fecundity and her catastrophes than a hundred thou-
sand of that olden time, and not one hundred-thou-
sandth of the generative power was needed. Then but
a poor fraction of the life-energy could be given up to
education. The offspring had to be trained in masses

38 Limanora

or have no training at all. The parents were too
busy earning the means of life to mould their fami-
lies, and had too many children to give heed to the
character of the individual. All the offspring were
handed over to professional trainers, who managed
them in the mass, and who had to work by the methods
of nature with its myriad children through the law of
the survival of the fittest. They had to be handled
like armies, and the stricter the discipline, the better
the result was supposed to be; and where the people
were counted in masses and moved in masses the bet-
ter it undoubtedly was for the survival of the state.
Schools and universities were a necessity of that far-
back stage of civilisation; they were the drill-sergeants
of civil life, dragooning the young and their ideas into
accordance with the prevailing and accepted type.
Too much independence of character or thought or
manner would have broken the ranks and endangered
the existence of the commonweal. But the chief pur-
pose of life on the world, the progress of the species,
was ignored in this devotion to mere persistence of the
species. All variant germs and elements that nature
supplies in every individual it brings forth were
smoothed down or annihilated into uniformity. The
type persisted from century to century unchanged.
Only by stealth or by audacity did any new or alien
element succeed in modifying the species; and when
it did succeed the modification was as often retrograde
as progressive. Therefore, in order to be secure from
variation, public opinion punished all habits that would
lead to independence of character or thought or feeling.
As soon as the great exilings had been completed,
the lyimanorans recognised that the best chance of swift
progress was the selection and preservation of the finest

Hermitry 39

variants in their character and thoughts. They there-
fore abolished the profession of teacher, that manufac-
turer of uniformity, and all schools and universities,
hot-beds of convention, worship of antiquity, and
retrogression. They by no means abolished education ;
they recreated it, intensified it, and made it the chief
function of the community. The whole time and ener-
gies of the parents, or, as the case might be, of the
proparents, were given up for a period of from fifty
to seventy years to the training and moulding of each
child. Nothing was left to nature or haphazard. And
every new tendency or faculty that was discovered in
the pupil was recorded and reported to the council of
sages. It was discussed by them, and, if judged to be
hostile to the progress of the race, the parents were as-
sisted in eradicating it; if manifestly progressive, every
means was taken to make it grow; if doubtful in its
results, it was submitted to the community, and their
instincts soon brought them to a decision. Thus it
was that their world was being continually renovated.
Never was an idea or method of action rejected simply
because it was new. Every opportunity of advance
was seized and tested. Every suggestion of a new
direction of progress was investigated and followed
out till it was seen to be impracticable.

And, to prevent emphasising the old and outworn or
reviving the past, the young were isolated from one
another; for, as the embryo records in its growth the
stages of animalism through which terrestrial life passed
upwards from the unicellular to the complex human
organisation, so the immature periods that come be-
tween infancy and full manhood record human develop-
ment, prehistoric as well as historic. The long ages of
primitive futility in presence of the powers of nature

40 Limanora

are abbreviated into the helpless years of infancy.
Prehistoric savagery shows itself in various traces in
the rebellious, adventure-loving, omnivorous phase of
boyhood. The first stages of civilisation appear in the
early years of puberty; its later stages in the approach
to full manhood. The imperfect past ever springs up
like weeds amid the growth of the new life, and will
choke it if encouraged. And nothing, they held, gave
such persistence to the evils and imperfections of the
past, thus appearing in early life, as the gregariousness
of youth. Nothing had done so great a wrong to the
race, or had so hindered its progress, as their former
education system with its schools and universities. To
throw men in the immature stages of their life into
close intercourse was to confirm their immaturities, to
encourage atavism, to make the past tyrannise over
the future. As long as their old system continued,
their civilisation was enslaved to the times that were
gone, and imagination deified the world as it had been.
Next to their exiling policy, their educational reform
was one of the most important starting-points of their
new and swiftly progressive civilisation. I was aston-
ished at the length and frequency of my isolations
during the period of my training. For years I saw few
or none but the two proparents to whose care I had
been handed over, even after I had been introduced to
other sections of the community. In the process of my
advance towards lyimanoran habits and powers, I was
often left for days together to my own thoughts, and
yet in the presence of some supervising power that
seldom made itself definite to any of my senses or even
to my mind. Throughout these intervals of solitude,
I felt continual suggestion of noble thought and emotion
come to me from my surroundings, the divine music

Hermitry 41

that rang so softly and variedly amid the silences, the
deep meaning of the arts that filled every corner of my
life, the magnetic energy that rayed forth from un-
known centres upon my spirit. The finest impulses of
my nature became dominant in me at these times and
grew in strength. I came to recognise the power that
such solitude gave to character. Without it I should
have inclined to become the echo of my tutors, even
though they were ever impressing upon me the neces-
sity of thinking and acting for myself. They were so
noble, so far above the men and women I had met or
heard of or read of that it was a hard task not to fall
down and worship them.

Once I had the misfortune to question the benefits*
of prolonged seclusion. I urged the praises of friend-
ship so common in the literature of my country, and
spoke with great fervour of the pleasures of social inter-
course, the keen emulation on the path of development
it stirred, and the wide influence which the finest char-
acters had. I painted in glowing colours all that re-
fined society might become, — the witty Parisian salons
of the eighteenth century, the artistic circles in the
fifteenth-century Italian republics, the brilliant associa-
tion of thoughtful men in some of the London literary
sets of the nineteenth century. What could be nobler
than such intellectual brilliancy of intercourse as is re-
corded in the biographies of the great men and beautiful
and refined women of the West ! Then I turned to the
happiness of children and youth together in the gardens
or woods or on the shores of the ocean, and their sad-
ness when they moped alone in their rooms or at their
books. Companionship was the very life of childhood
and youth. Did not solitary musings even in maturity
produce morbid self-introspection ? The intercourse,

42 Limanora

even with superiors and elders, was somewhat unwhole-
some for the young spirit, — it crushed spontaneity and
naturalness and confidence in one's inner self.

I worked myself up to a climax of eloquence, and
thought that I had demolished all possibility of defence
of their system. But I had succeeded only by ignoring
the vices and weaknesses of society. These wise men
quietly and almost unconcernedly took me behind the
gaudy theatrical curtain of the world, and smiled to
think how like their old social ideals had been to those
I had described, and to see the same vanity and postur-
ing in European refinement as in their own evil past.
They mourned over my blindness of mind in failing to
look through the gorgeous transparency at the tawdry
vulgarities behind. Following it through many forms
and stages of life, animal and human, they showed me
the law of social intercourse; not the highest but the
lowest emotional and moral level of a herd or circle do
the natures arid minds of its members ultimately reach,
however lofty the aspirations of some of them may be.
A company in which free utterance is the rule is soon
mastered by base interpretation of the noblest lives,
and it is to guard against the effects of this hydrostatic
law of ethics that churches and temples have been
erected. There the awe of a higher power and the
conventions of worship conceal the inevitability of the
law, and save the shyer natures for brief periods from
the evil influence of the bold. The most masterful re-
ligions have always provided permanent refuges for
the finer spirits who dread conflict with the unscru-
pulous wit or power of the world, and who know how
in a struggle of speech or action or even pure thought
the wielder of the fouler weapons wins. It has been
the rule throughout civilised history that the greatest

Hermitry .43

characters, if they cling to moral principle, at last
withdraw into solitude partial or complete, and become
the sages of the world ; if they remain in action and
succeed, the necessity for further success drives them
to accept the moral level of the lowest they have to
struggle with; for if immoral men of less intellectual
power overcome them, defeat means to them ultimate
exhaustion of the soul; nothing bleaches the faculties
and reduces them to the common level like failure after
failure. However great a hero may be to begin with,
success in action closes his moral career, whilst failure
closes his intellectual. To die in his first great victory
is the truest happiness that can befall him.

In fact the lyimanorans came ages before to see that
all public life with its competitions and ambitions,
social, artistic, political, military, meant the triumph
of cunning or force; it meant the retrogression to the
nakedest savagery hidden underneath the gewgaws of
civilisation. No real advance could be made by any
form of humanity so long as its ablest spirits were
drawn into the furious struggle for glory, in which the
cruellest and most audacious cunning was bound to
win. The founders of new religions and new philoso-
phies have been strong spirits who saw the foul im-
broglio before them in public life and shrank back from
it. The first aim of the Limanorans, when once they
had rid themselves of their more degenerate brethren,
was to abolish this contest of might and cunning, and
turn their stronger spirits to the true progress of them-
selves and their race. And little difficulty was ex-
perienced in accomplishing this most fundamental
reform; the island had been purged of the furiously
ambitious, of all who longed for the naked palaestra of
civilised savagery. They knew better than most men

44 Limanora

how much of the essence of life was competition, how
necessary to all progress was the struggle for existence,
how fundamental was the law of the survival of the
fittest. But they realised vividly that nature unguided
often chose false directions, that the struggle may be in
a myriad various arenas that differ greatly from one
another in nobleness or baseness, that the law if left to
itself might lead to the survival of the fiercest or cun-
ningest or basest according to the conditions that were
to be fitted. The will of man could work on the con-
ditions, so elevating the struggle and leading the law
to a nobler issue. They did not, they could not, put
an end to the struggle. What they did was to with-
draw it from false grounds and false aims, and guard
it from any appearance of the lower nature, sensuality,
cunning, or force. The competitive energy in every
Limanoran's nature was bent towards his own future
and the future of his race, and strove to surpass the
past, if it were great and noble, and to cast it out, if it
were base and threatened to reappear. To strive up-
wards, to help the whole people to progress, these were
the aims that transformed the everlasting struggle and
the ever-working law.

This revolution in existence accomplished, and pub-
lic life having in consequence vanished, there ceased
all need of social display, of conversational fireworks,
and of tact in managing men either singly or in masses.
The object of gregarious education disappeared at once.
As long as the coarse and selfish struggle called public
life was the highest sphere, they knew the youth had
to be trained for it, its methods and aims had to be
adopted, and schools and universities were a necessity,
as miniature reflections of the greater world. In order
to succeed in life they had to be rolled together and

Hermitry 45

tumbled against one another like pebbles in a stream
till they had taken the conventional smoothness of
outline and similarity of sheen; they had to learn to
keep the wild beast in their hearts and the silken cour-
tier in their manners, to cloak untruth and hypocrisy
in an appearance of brilliancy or wisdom, to make
grasping selfishness seem almost divine love, and brutal
cruelty and arrogance the most dazzling refinement.
It was painful to read the flashy lies and stabs in the
dark that went for wit, and the cruel intrigue and
showy falsehood that went to the making of history,
in those old times. Even the friendship of the foremost
was but a piece of acting; little trust could be put in
it; it served its purpose and was abandoned as soon as
it failed to impress the dupes. And solitaries then
seemed useless, moping self- analysers; they made no
history and they were soon forgotten. No parents
could afford to let any one of their children thus lose
his life; and, however gentle and meditative he might
be by nature, he must be thrust into the cruel struggle
of school and university in order to acquire hardness
and brilliancy; however virtuous and noble in purpose,
he had to prepare for the arena of polished scoundrelism.
As soon as these conditions of competition ceased,
education in masses had to cease too; it must be a
miniature of the general life and a preparation for it.
At a distance and in a haze it seems as if the immature
in their sports were leading a life of primitive and
happy innocence; but innocence often accompanies un-
tamed passion and fierce emulation. The appearance
of simplicity comes from their ignorance of the advance
of the world. Nothing did the Limanorans so shudder
at as the chance of perpetuating the methods and habits
of this early and undeveloped stage throughout later

46 Limanora

life. What their associative education in former times
had done for them was to confirm the vices of savagery
under the gloved conventions that civilised life de-
manded, and to destroy the simplicity for ever. Soli-
tary training under the supervision of sages, they soon
found, had the reverse effect; it confirmed the natural-
ness and spontaneity, and swept out the inclination to
intrigue and arrogance and cruelty.

There was a childlikeness in their natures that gave
great beauty to their faces; and this they retained
through the longest life and the most absorbing work.
If there was one quality more than others which
marked them as a race, it was their gentle and trustful
outlook upon life, their naive candour and transparency
of character, their simple wonder and delight over any
new discovery or invention. They never grudged the
quiet admiration any word or action deserved. They
never assumed that tone of superiority or sophistica-
tion, which, coming as it does from envy, jealousy, or
malice, mars all praise or blame. They were children
to one another in the limpidity of their life. And so
their features, which had not often the attractions of
regularity, had come to be transfigured by this single-
heartedness; however old and experienced and wise
they might be, all possessed this divine beauty of child-
hood. Sailors and backwoodsmen, men who have to
spend long periods of their lives in comparative soli-
tude, away from the sophistications of crowded life,
often reveal traces of this childlike beauty of nature
and expression. And it was this peculiar educational
system and its long intervals of solitary meditation
that kept the L/imanorans children, simple and ingenu-
ous, till the day each vanished in the ether.

What deprived these isolations of bitterness was that

Hermitry 47

one never felt lonely nor abandoned by his fellows dur-
ing them. In a moment, there could be communica-
tion in thought or magnetic sympathy with his dearest
friends, and within a brief space they would be at his
side. They often resisted the associative impulse,
through fear that it might be but the return of the old
immaturity in disguise; and they knew that friend-
ship was ever at call, and that all true solitudes deep-
ened the current of life.

As I came to feel the spirit of their existence, these
arguments grew self-evident; I saw how all-important
to progress were these intervals of isolation. They had
studied with the minutest care and ultimate shuddering
the features of their old civilisation, and they had
found that the worst of them came from the associative
principle in the training of youth. Atavism became
their greatest horror; in the breast of every child born
into civilised life an embryo savage is born, and this
had been vitalised and fostered by sympathy with what
was savage in companions and schoolmates. Under
their old school and university systems the age of train-
ing was that which corresponded to the military stage in
the development of man; and boys were for ever fight-
ing, girls ever encouraging to fight; emulation became
fierce rivalry and hatred. A crude stage of the past
was confirmed and perpetuated through life by con-
stant association in the time of life that stood for it.
That was why their leisured classes had so devoted
themselves during peace to the wilder sports of the
hunting stage of mankind, whilst they were ever itch-
ing for war that their sons might distinguish themselves.
That was why they had indulged so often in breaches
of the marriage bond, and outraged the monogamy that
they professed to revere; the minds of the youth had

48 Limanora

been inflamed by the free proximity of the sexes before
the passions had been mastered, before the polygamous
and unmoral stage of their career had been passed
through. And education, instead of checking the
perpetuation of these immaturities, encouraged it.
Teachers had come to pride themselves in the develop-
ment of these savage stages of boyhood and girlhood,
and called the weaknesses by euphemistic names, pluck,
pride, grace. The young men and women were taught
to glory in them. And thus evil became eternal. In
more primitive life, there had been of necessity a wiser
method of training. There were no large centres of
population where their youth was massed in schools
and universities. Families wandered or rested by
themselves; and the hardships of existence ensured
the survival of the few that were fittest. These few
had from their earliest years to join their elders in
their pursuits, and they learned in such society to pass
rapidly through the primitive stages of man's develop-
ment, emulating the skill of their betters and following
them with modesty and reverence. In the later in-
dustrial and centralistic ages the youth had to be
massed educationally, and by the mutual encourage-
ment of sympathy came to glory in their immaturities
as perfections, and desired to prolong the savage stage
of their life into later years. They judged their elders
by false and atavistic standards and so lost their
modesty and reverence. It was only an occasional
wave of lofty feeling issuing from some inspired poet
or prophet that raised one generation above the preced-
ing. For centuries and centuries they stood still or
retrograded. Crimes were sanctified in war and poli-
tics; the evil past became a fetich; impetuosity, anger,
hatred, revenge, falsehood, lust, were tricked out in

Hermitry 49

the apparel of virtues, and made the aims and the
glories of the leisured. It was the associative method
of education that produced such results. And, after
the great purgation of the race, they were amazed to
see how blind they had been. Would any civilised
parents agree to send out their child into the wilderness
there to spend the educable period of life amongst
savages, primitive in their instincts and habits, even
if the savages had the most persuasive and influential
missionaries amongst them who would change them in
a few years into civilised beings? Yet this was what
their ancestors had been doing when they concentrated
youth in schools and universities.

Never before the age of twenty-five were the Lima-
noran youth allowed any freedom of social intercourse,
and then only for brief periods and under the super-
vision of sages. And if there was any sign of atavism
apparent in them at their first draught of social life,
back they were sent into isolation, that their character
might be strengthened, and the stage of peril passed.
Even when socially enfranchised, theip first companions
had lived beyond their fiftieth year. By that boundary-
line, it was held, all the risk of atavism had passed, and
all the chances and possibilities of the character had
been discovered and provided for. It was not till the
seventy-fifth year that anyone was supposed to be fit
for parenthood; for then, though the faculties and
powers still went on improving even till death, most of
them had reached the maturity of self-control and inter-
subordination; then reason had begun to be master,
and all the stages of the development of man before the
final purgation of the race had been traversed.

Only a few years before this epoch in their lives were
they permitted to look into the deeper mysteries of

50 Limanora

existence. They thought it one of the strangest pieces
of inversion, if not desecration, to place religious ideas,
as we did, before the youngest. Nothing but evil could
come of such an attempt. With the lyimanorans it was
the final initiation into life to acquaint their grown
men and women with the sublimest thoughts and
doubts and emotions on the purpose of existence; it
was the copestone of their education; after all the field
of knowledge had been traversed by them and all the
reverences had been instilled into them, the last rever-
ence was revealed to them. Then and not till then
were they capable of realising its fulness. Communi-
cated in childhood or early youth, before the powers
were mature, before the animal and savage stages of
development had been gone through, it could end only
in gross familiarity or gross superstition; the noblest
and most inward of thoughts and emotions would be
misunderstood. What was it that had made their old
religions so stagnant, so obstructive to all advance, but
this mistaken principle of attempting to teach the
holiest and deepest ideas to the young! It made their
ancestors cleave to crude superstitions as if divine
and refuse to give up any item of their childish ideas
of them. So thoroughly are the sources of our youth-
ful impressions lost in the mists of the past that any
connected with reverence seem to come from the divine
eternity beyond birth.

CHAPTER V

JOURNEY TO THE VALLEY OF MEMORIES

ONE of the things this people feared most was en-
slavement to the past ; and I was encouraged
to strip my mind of all sentiment connected with the
life I had led before my arrival and all superstitious
devotion to the historic. Bury the dead past, was one
of their primary maxims. Nor would they permit re-
ligion or any other conservative element to hallow
tradition. The world is well quit of what it has been,
was another of their sayings. They seemed to look
upon the past as a fierce pursuer ever ready to overtake
and strangle them. Out and away from it were they
ever hurrying. It was the dark shadow over existence.
And into the future, into the future and the sunshine,
they cut their way through the thick tangle of life.

I was much surprised, then, after I had been admitted
to the full confidence of my proparents, to hear them
refer with pleasure, if not joy, to what seemed nothing
but a glorification of the past. The name Fialume
came repeatedly into their conversations with each
other till at last it roused my curiosity. There was
something imaginative in the ideas connected with it;
it never rose to their lips without bringing into their
eyes a beautifully piteous expression that bordered

52 Limanora

almost on the ecstasy of joy. They saw that they had
piqued my curiosity; and before I had asked them they
gave me the information I desired. The word, Fialume,
translated, meant " the valley of memories." It was
the great library and university of the island. There
the second stage of education was largely passed. If
by the age of fifty all superstitious veneration of the
past had been eradicated from the nature of the new
citizen, he was led to this valley day after day, month
after month, until he had seen the career of the race,
and had grown familiar with the steps of its develop-
ment; he learned to shudder at the darkness out of
which it had come, and to watch with joy the growing
light and the fleeing shadows as it neared the present.
Thus did he learn true gratitude for what he was, and
true reverence for the future towards which they were
all striving. I was not yet fit to enter the precincts of
the valley. I had still too much of that anguished yet
exquisite homesickness for my own past to be trusted
with insight into a past that might seem great to me.
And yet my probation would be shorter, as my buried
world was so different from theirs; there would be less
danger of superstitious reverence awaking in me for any
of their old stages or antiquated institutions, and no
danger of Ayala stirring my idolatrous devotion. This
new word puzzled me, they saw. And they explained
that it was but the older name for the same valley; it
meant " the resting-place of the untrammelled." In
fact, their great library and university was their grave-
yard too.

Years passed in happy renovation of my whole be-
ing, body and soul. As I looked back I began to
shudder at the past out of which I had come, its low
ideals, and its still lower planes of living; it seemed

Journey to the Valley of Memories 53

centuries behind me and not mere years; it had grown
into a murky cloud on the far horizon. I could see
how often I had been on the verge of despair or disease
and began to know the blindness and ignorance that
had been almost the air I breathed. I shrank in
horror from all I had been; for I could examine the
poor fabric of it almost microscopically now. There
was little fear indeed of my ever longing for what I had
left behind me.

Thus at last there came the supreme moment that
I had laboured for. I was to be permitted to visit
Fialume. I shall never forget the day. I had swept
out of my mind analogies for their great graveyard
from the doleful surroundings of death to which I had
been accustomed in my native land, the long train of
mourners, the ghastly hearse with its burden of mor-
tality, the unkempt grass of the place of tombs, the
dreary wait beneath the unsympathetic sky; and then
the rattle of the clods upon the coffin-lid, and the frantic
effort to drive from the soul the thought of the gradual
corruption of the body and the final residue of skull and
bones. Years though I had been in Limanora, I had
never heard of a funeral. Indeed deaths were as
rare as births in a community that had striven to avoid
the lavish waste of nature, and had so studied the
human frame as to know how to arrest decay of its
powers and to give every individual full possibility
of developing himself and through himself his race.
The reckless and indiscriminate bearings and dyings
of the old world were no advance on the course of the
animal or even the vegetable sphere; the higher the
organisation the fewer the young and the greater
the care of them. But man in other lands had still,
with all his thought and foresight, the extravagant

54 Limanora

method of nature, and had increased and multiplied
without stint in order that an occasional exception
might help by favouring conditions to lead the race
onwards and perhaps upwards. Thousands of Alex-
anders and Cromwells, of Mahomets and Socrates, of
Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares had lived and
died unknown, because they had not been born into
the circumstances which fitted their peculiar faculties.
This people had seen that the method of nature was
haphazard, if not heartless,. that the rate of progress
could be indefinitely accelerated if every child that
was born were born with a definite purpose, and his
life were guarded and extended till that purpose was
fulfilled. They meant every act of generation for a
definite advance. Birth and death were in the hands
of the race and not of chance, and thus it was that I
had never seen or heard of obsequies during the many
years of my probation.

So my difficulties were solved by my guardians be-
fore we set out for the national place of tombs. Yet
my curiosity was as active as before. This was the
beginning of a new epoch in my new life. How could
its wonders surpass those of the past years! And I
was all eagerness to study the past history of this noble
race, to study the gradual ascent to the height they
had now reached.

The whole atmosphere was jubilant as we rose into
its upper levels and thrilled with light and electricity;
even unseen living forms from other stars mingled with
the sunlight that supplied so much for the support of
our being. There was not a cloud to mar the purity
of the ether, inspired with wandering breaths of wind.
We rose joyous and bright under the gleam of the sun,
I alone having my exhilaration somewhat dashed by

Journey to the Valley of Memories 55

the consciousness of my laggard gait; for my limbs
were not yet light enough, my arm and leg muscles
not strong enough, to accomplish any but the briefest
journey upon wings, and that in the most awkward
and shambling way. I was borne in one of their
faleenas or weight-transference flies; it was one of the
smallest, yet I had room to move about freely in the
car in spite of the baggage of the troop. It was not
unlike a huge tropical butterfly that I had admired in
a case in one of our museums; the car was long and
narrow and pointed like a boat at either end; from
each side stretched out wings that were enormous be-
side the body they carried; and these, rainbow-hued,
seemed to fill the whole air through which we passed
with a solid gleam, so quickly did they shuttle up and
down; aft extended slantwise two great antennae-like
shafts that moved hither and thither to defeat the
baffling puffs of wind and so direct our flight; along
the keel lay the engine that produced the beat of the
wings, silent and motionless as if it were but a shaft
that strengthened the framework. There was no vibra-
tion, in spite of the great speed of the faleena. A huge
awning, so high above us as to be out of reach of the
wings at their fullest stretch, seemed to hold us easily
aloft at whatever level we desired, and to let us gently
down whenever the wings beat slowly enough to be
seen as they moved up and down. It was in one of
these slow movements that I discovered the principle
of these sails; they were made of the wonderful metal,
irelium, and had its properties of lightness, tenuity,
and strength; I had noticed as they flashed solidly
through the air that there was an alternation in the
flash of greater or less sheen; I now saw that each
wing consisted of two fine plates of open scroll-work

56 Limanora

sliding over one another back and forth; in the upward
stroke the holes were open so that the air passed easily
through, and the whole expanse looked like a delicately
reticulated fan; in the downward stroke the upper plate
so slid over the lower that the apertures of both were
completely closed, and the wing formed a solid sheet
of metal. I afterwards saw how simply this was ac-
complished. The under irelium network had but one
motion, that on the hinges attached to the side of the
car, but it had grooves on its fore and aft edges; into
these, corresponding projections on the upper network
fitted, moving in them easily by means of small half-
hidden wheels; this upper plate was attached to inde-
pendent hinges on a long rod that was drawn back and
forth about half an inch by a connection with the driv-
ing engine; its motion, however, was completely con-
trolled by the ligatures that drew the wing upwards
and downwards, so that they should ever be in harmony,
and the closing of the pores should occur only at the
beginning of the downward beat, and their opening
only at the beginning of the upward beat. The effect
to the eye was very beautiful ; the transparency of the
metal let the coloured light of the sky shine through it
even when solid; but when reticulated the azure seemed
to form into a flashing loom of the finest lace. I could
not cease gazing at the ever-shifting lights that played
through the embroidery of the wings. It was pleasing
to the ear as well: for the whirr and creak that usually
accompany the flight of great birds and the movement
of machinery were used up as undertones to a grand
but simple musical march that seemed the very spirit
of the beat of the wings.

For a time these sights and sounds held me en-
tranced, so that I was scarcely conscious of our ascent.

Journey to the Valley of Memories 57

When the power of the charm had freed my senses,
I looked down, and my heart leapt into my mouth;
eagles being swept from the island by the blast of
the storm-cone appeared to me as flies crawling over
the sun-glitter of the houses below or on the snows of
Lilaroma. I shrank back breathless at the sight, and
imagined myself falling down this heart-sickening dis-
tance. Then the almost irresistible desire to throw
myself into this abyss came over me, and I clutched at
the framework of the car that I might not yield to this
feeling.

I had forgotten my companion for the time: one
glance at her drove the terror from my mind. I saw
the beauty of the benignance that shone upon her face,
and my spirit nestled in her protecting smile that had
interpreted aright the horrors of my thoughts. I was
not merely thankful that I had not been alone with my
terrible longing: I could almost give my life up to this
being who swept out my fear by the loving- kindness of
her glance. My guardians had been unwilling to trust
me alone in the faleena, even though the engine and
the machinery were simple enough to have been man-
aged by a child. So they sent with me Thyriel, who,
I long afterwards found, had been selected by the sages
as my spiritual twin as soon as they had tested my
past history, my faculties, and my possibilities. None
other in the whole community was so fitted to stimulate
my best qualities, to be preferred by me as intimate
friend and comrade or, if passionate emotions followed
the same direction as friendship, to mate with me as
parent or proparent, when full maturity had been
reached. This I came to know only when all had
fallen out as they had anticipated and desired. We
were both allowed our full option and free will in our

58 Limanora

spiritual approaches and agreements: we were not
forced into each other's company, only when oppor-
tunity for mutual protection or confidence came were
we paired for the venture. Everything issued as they
had planned just as if we had had no free choice in
the matter, and yet our impulses felt as free as if we
had been the only living organisms in the universe.
We chose with a passion that would not be denied; we
were willing in our freedom of attraction to surrender
life and all to each other.

This flight was one of the first great adventures on
which we were together, and it is graven upon my
very heart. Thyriel, O Thyriel, I await thee with soul
weary of waiting! What are the years now but cen-
turies without thee ? I am alone but for God and thee.
It is the only consolation of my soul that thou risest
ever towards God and livest in God, and that I rise
and live with thee.

It is exquisite pain (and delight too) for me to tell
of that flight into the ether; for then I first realised
how incomplete was the sum of my existence without
this being. She was so gentle and yet so strong, so
full of eager sympathy and yet so vigorous of character.
She knew every weak point in my system, and bent
herself to correct its weakness or protect me from its
effects without making me conscious of her sacrifice.
With power that I could not but acknowledge as the
superior of mine, she played the companion and equal.
I could have worshipped her almost as a divinity ; but
she modestly bent herself to my level, and veiled her
superiority in her childlike playfulness. I shrank in
fear from the implied familiarity, and could not bring
myself to recognise except intellectually the common
humanity and the difference of sex. For years I felt

Journey to the Valley of Memories 59

too much adoration to pass into love. It was indeed
long before I could admit myself capable of her friend-
ship. But gradually she led me to put more confidence
in my powers, and to recognise the superiority of some
of them. My intellectual admiration took a warmer
glow that soon fused our intercourse into the most de-
voted friendship. So braced were we by our mutual
help in our common pursuits that we seemed helpless,
the one without the other. Yet the sense of sex was
not stirred for years after the bond between us had
grown inseverable.

It was this flight that first awakened me to the
wealth of her nature and her immeasurable power and
desire of self-sacrifice. Like her people, she had none
of the statuesque beauty or moulded regularity of
feature that has swayed the thoughts and passions
of European sex; but the spirit that shone through
made the face divine. I rested almost as in a dream,
as I felt the benignance of her soul; and before long
I was able to look calmly over with her at the increas-
ing depths of light through which we had come. Be-
low us we saw valley and hill pearled with the gleam
of wide-scattered houses; we could see the flash of
streams and rivers as they broke through the darkness
of forests or fell in snowy cascades; and around the
coast the sea spun for the black fringe of rock a mov-
ing thread of surf. Around us rose the carolling of
many voices to the gates of heaven. Song after song,
anthem after anthem, burst forth from the various
groups of our comrades. Buoyant were they as thistle-
down, revelling in the pure serenity of the upper air.
For very joy I could have thrown myself among them
and joined the harmony of their flight; but her glance
was upon me, and I returned to thoughts of prudence.

60 Limanora

She showed me why we had risen so high into upper
air far above most of the Limanorans who were flying
with us. These faleenas could not adapt themselves
to the varying winds as the human figure and arms
could when managing wings. They had to rise into
the regions of calms or of steady winds, in order that
they might float by power of sail down to their destina-
tion. What seemed a mere awning acted in two ways;
it served as aeroplane to steady the whole structure in
the air and as parachute when it began to descend ; and
could be inflated with heated air, to help the wings in
raising the faleena upwards. She pointed out in the
far distance below us a gleaming line that marked the
valley towards which we were voyaging, and then
looking at a height-gauge that hung beside her steering-
seat and at a wind-gauge' that stretched over the side
of the car, she decided by a brief calculation that we
had reached the proper key-place of the arch we were
making in our journey, and that we should by chang-
ing our course wing our way with ease down to the de-
sired goal. She touched a notch in the side of the car
and above there sounded a flute-like note, that, varying
in strength and pitch, made no disharmony with the
music of the wings. I looked up and there I could
see the awning gradually collapse ; it had bulged
downwards, I had noticed, in a strange way ; the
tenseness of its curves disappeared, and as we began
to fall, it became concave, and broke the velocity of
our descent.

The wings still plied with bewildering swiftness of
beat, and forced us onwards as we shortened our dis-
tance from the earth. We still could hear the music of
our comrades, but so softened by the ong space between
that I could have imagined it the spheral harmony

Journey to the Valley of Memories 61

of orbs which circle round the throne of God. But I
could see them, dim flakes of light in the azure as they
outdistanced us, the few laggards that had skimmed
above us for a short time still showing the outlines of
their forms, yet rapidly lessening into star-specks. I
was gazing out at them with the exhilaration of the
outlook and of the ether in my blood, when the wings
suddenly began to labour with short, irregular beat. I
glanced at Thyriel. She kept her face unmoved, as
she examined the engine beside her and the various
keys and wheels and hinges of the machinery. I took
courage, for she looked quite unconcerned, yet I could
see that she had not discovered the cause for the uneasy
motion of the wings. She told me that she would have
to examine the outside, but that I might keep my mind
at peace, for there was no danger. She adjusted her
wings and dived from the side, then rose to our swiftly
descending faleena, and by the strength of her muscles
seemed to stay the descent, while she looked at all the
gearing of the sails from below. Then she climbed into
the car, and began to work at a small pump in the fore-
part. I ran to help her, and in a few minutes I felt the
faleena buoyant again and holding its own against
gravitation; we had refilled the balloon of the awning
enough to keep her afloat. Thyriel stopped the engines
and let the sails lie lazily out on the same plane as the
car, then she fastened a cord to the bow and, having
adjusted her wings again, seized the cord and leapt
over. I saw her purpose : she was towing the maimed
faleena through the air, still at a great height from the
earth. We were near enough, however, for me to see
as I looked over the danger we had escaped. We had
been falling upon a group of pinnacled and serrated
rocks that would have gored our vehicle and endangered

62 Limanora

my life. Moreover, we were still a long way from
Fialume.

Thanks to the cessation of our music, the attention
of the distant aeronauts was drawn to our laboured
flight. It was not half an hour before we saw them
hastening back to meet us like a swarm of butterflies;
and in a few minutes more they were beside us. I
watched their evolutions in the air with absorbed de-
light; and ere I knew what they were about, they each
held a cord from the bow of our faleena, and Thyriel
was on board with me directing our flight. How loud
their chorus sounded now that they were near! They
timed the beat of their wings and the straining of their
cords to it, and we sped on our downward way even
more quickly than before. I did not know till long
after how great was the danger out of which I had
escaped. Yet I was conscious of my comrade's courage
and that to her I owed much. It brought us closer
together in spiritual friendship, and we seemed to feel
ourselves singled out of mankind for mutual confidence.

CHAPTER VI

FIAUJME

I WAS revelling in the thought of our comradeship
and in the exhilaration of the motion through the
air, when the chorus began to soften. It sounded far
off, like the echo of an echo, and out of the distance
rang notes of welcome. Our company burst out of
their low tones of pleading into loud triumph and joy.
Then came the whispered softness of their former song;
answered softly as if from the hollows of the earth.
This swelled again into welcome, and the air rang with
notes of joy.

My eyes followed our route; and beneath us I saw a
huge valley forested to the ridge on either side and
spanned with a glittering roof that turned the light of
the sun into myriads of many-coloured gems. Over
the cliffs or in through the olive-green or blossoming
trees swept streams with rainbowed cascades, covering
the vast dome with spray till it seemed an arch of ice
that melted in the sun. We made for the entrance of
the gorge, out of which fumed and fretted through
gates of pinnacled rock a milky torrent. Borne on
mighty pillars of limpid metal rose a great archway;
and this enclosed lesser semicircles spanning the vari-
ous roads that led into the wild tropical scenery of the

63

64 Limanora

dale. I never saw such an impressive spectacle be-
neath human roof. Cataract rose above cataract in
the centre. On all sides fell miniature cascades, or
rose fountains that sent in wayward clouds their break-
ing water-spears and flags. The flowers and shrubs
and trees of every climate under heaven seemed to be
collected here, and to blend in marvellous harmony of
colour. Cool winds blew from hidden sources wafting
the fountain-spray or the odours of the flowers about us.
The beating rays of the sun were softened by the stream-
cooled dome; and out of some cave or hollow in the
far distance came the murmur of entrancing music.

We had descended and passed far within the won-
drous structure before I could recall my senses from
their bewildered enjoyment of the scene. Then I saw
that our company had parted in various directions,
vanishing in groups or pairs, round a verdant cliff or
into some overarching bower. I was left alone with
Thyriel. The sudden loneliness of the vast valley-
hall made me feel the delight of having her spirit to
lean upon. In spite of the companionship of the
flowers and the close ranks of the forest, I felt the
great spaces of the valley solitary because of the lofti-
ness of the roof, like the arch of night making space
seem more vast than under the warm, indefinite sky of
noonday. Bewildered and alone, my thoughts sought
the shelter of friendship.

Not long had I felt this consolation when both of us
were in the shadow of a nobler and more mature per-
sonality. He came I knew not whence, and the sud-
denness of his appearance added to the awe I felt at
once for his character. He was, I was certain, one of
the sages of the community, so deeply had the centuries
engraved their experience upon his face and spirit.

Fialume 65

There seemed to come from him even before he spoke
or recognised our presence a benign and godlike in-
fluence, and I knew at once the greatness of his soul.
There were the lines of long struggle and complete self-
mastery upon the countenance like the curved stratifi-
cation and cleavage of the older rocks. He had not to
speak before I had surrendered myself entirely to his
guidance. He who had seen so many hundreds of years
pass over the earth and learned all the lessons they
had to teach was the natural master of two such novices
in life as we were. For I now felt that, however superior
Thyriel was to myself in instincts and development
and beauty of soul, she was completely overshadowed
by this spirit of centuries.

Yet when he spoke to us we felt that he had still the
elasticity of youth about him; he had in his words and
actions the rapid recoil of healthy tissues that have a
long career before them yet, and in his faculties and
ideas there was still the unlimited capacity of develop-
ment. After explaining that he was to be the inter-
preter of this house beautiful for us, he led us by a
maze of paths through the blossom and the verdure to
an open space, from the centre of which rose a noble
flight of steps flanked by porticoes and colonnades.
These we ascended, resting at times on broad platforms,
and looking out on the fairy scene that more and more
unfolded itself to our eyes.

At last we stood on the highest platform, not many
hundred feet from the gleaming roof. He touched a
spring here and there, and out of the tessellated floor
came rests that moved automatically with the move-
ments of the head and eyes; wherever I gazed as I
reclined thither my rest wheeled round. This I after-
wards discovered was managed by hidden springs in

66 Limanora

the groove in which the head rested. These were rests
of observation, and the purpose was to allow of the
whole energy and consciousness being directed into one
channel, that of vision. The numberless easy methods
of rest and motion that this people used would have
certainly induced sloth and luxury but for their in-
herent energy of nature. To them these methods were
but economisers of the time and power which might be
spent on less routine work.

I soon saw that the valley ran more than a score of
miles into the heart of the mountains, its deepest hol-
lows rising now by easy gradations, again by bold plat-
forms of rock far above the level on which we rested.
For the dome, I could now see, consisted not of one
span whose top ran horizontally along the ridges of the
valley, but of hundreds of spans that rose arch above
arch up the slope of the mountain. There was some-
thing in the terracing of the valley, too, that suggested
the hand of man. Nature's work had been supple-
mented and rounded by noble art. There was regu-
larity in irregularity, statuesque beauty amid wild
grandeur. Human thought had utilised the massive
ideas of nature. The scene would have overawed the
spirit and made it solitary, but for the familiarity of
minor features moulded by human imagination that
had not geological ages and forces at its disposal.

In amongst the greenery of the forest stood on lofty
pedestals what I took for memorial statues of the dead,
with features so like to life in every minute line and
curve and even graining of the skin, that I marvelled
at such waste of human energy and imagination. My
guide soon saw my mental question, and showed me
that they were the dead themselves. The moment
after every trace of life had gone from the body it was

Fialume 67

ireliumised by an ingenious process; for every atom of
tissue and cell there was substituted one of irelium,
and thus no decay could approach it; it would retain
for untold centuries the form and expression of the
vanished man down to the minutest detail. As we
passed farther back into the valley I noticed a differ-
ence in the appearance of the statuesque dead; they
had not the hues and expression of the living, but were
leprous white, as if hewn out of marble with infinite
care. I appealed to Oolmo, my guide, and he told me
that these were their dead as they had been preserved
before the age of irelium and the discovery of the
process that rapidly changed living tissue into this
metal. At that period the body used to be buried for
years in stalactitic caves, where the percolation of
the liquid gypsum turned it after a time into a calca-
reous statue.

These caves ran into the mountain at the head of
Fialume, and were now used for converting traceries
and forms too delicate to work in marble into white
stone. They made a beautiful contrast in ornamen-
tation to the rainbow-hued limpidity of irelium. The
process had been too long and slow for the petrifaction
of the dead. And about the same time as the method
of extracting irelium from the rocks had been dis-
covered, the careful study of the petrifactive methods
of nature had led to the new and rapid process of im-
mortalising the form and features of those who had
passed from life.

From our movable rests I could never have seen
what all these statues were. I would have said that
this was the island's great gallery of sculpture. But
there were other things that Oolmo pointed out to us
before he led us round this vast hall of his ancestry.

68 Limanora

He showed us far back in the recesses of the valley up
the slope of the mountain what looked in the distance
like a great settlement of some burrowing animal.
This was the oldest burying-place of the island, where
had been laid in apertures in the rock the urns that
contained the ashes of the dead; for they had brought
the practice of cremation with them in their primitive
migration from the south. Then followed a period of
superstition and recession, in which the priests taught
the sacredness of the human form and its final resur-
rection and when they buried the bodies deep in the
earth beneath the urned rock recesses. A period of re-
action against religion followed, and sanitation became
one of the first essentials of the new scientific era. It
was feared that plagues would come from this old
burying-place on the side of the mountain, if the per-
colating waters brought the corruption of the rotting
corpses down into the valley. It was resolved that the
remains of their ancestors should be dug up and re-
moved to a mound made for them on a level with the
sea. Then it was found that almost all the bodies had
become stone white as snow, for the calcareous perco-
lations that came along the surface of the rock down
the hill had done their work, and an accident in dig-
ging up one of the lower row of graves revealed the
marvellous stalactitic caves underneath. There had
been a movement towards a return to the practice of
cremation, but it was stopped at once by this discovery.
The caves became the natural burying-place, and out
of them the dead were brought and erected in the val-
ley when they had turned into stone.

After we had viewed the whole scene from our plat-
form under Oolmo's direction, he bade us enter a car
that had sprung up at his touch. It seemed made of

Fialume 69

gossamer, and I was afraid to enter it, till I felt the
toughness and strength of its material. It floated
rather than ran round the valley above the tops of the
tall trees. I could see no wheels, and there were no
rails for them to travel on if it had had them, nor had
it any wings or sails like our faleena. At last I saw
that it was hung by a transparent cord of metal from
some moving force in the dome that to me was invisible.
It was an electric car, and electric currents bore it aloft
and swept it along with lightning rapidity. But a
touch of Oolmo's finger broke the circuit and stopped
it in a moment.

I was not long held by this new wonder, for beneath
and around stretched the great graveyard, that seemed
a harmony of forest, wild, and garden. We rested at
intervals of a few miles on the lofty platforms, descend-
ing the flights of steps at times to view the statuesque
dead and their surroundings. Plere and there we came
across groups of young men and young women intently
listening to strange voices that seemed to issue from
some hidden being within the statued dead. These
were students, and the sounds were the voices of the
dead, treasured up on fine tablets of irelium, which
could either be read or made to re-utter their recorded
words. To me the silent bowed figures of the living
seemed the lifeless, the whispering dead seemed the
living. It was a piece of necromancy, I felt at first;
and, but for my questioning intellect, I should have
shrunk back in fear. It is true, I could not see the
lips of the erect figure move, and when I gazed long
enough some tremor of the eyelid would betray the life
of the listener; but for the first few minutes the illusion
was complete, and all the surroundings, the stillness,
the far echo of wailing music, the sombre trees, seemed

70 Limanora

to confirm it. Every new group we encountered pro-
duced the same eerie feeling.

But we passed on; and the joy which filled the
spaces of the great valley buried the sense of death.
It was the least funereal scene I had ever witnessed;
for along the paths and wide tree-arched avenues went
bands of carollers singing songs of triumph and glad-
ness, the air was sweet with the perfume of flowers,
and masses of varied colour broke the olive darkness
of the groves. The world was at once jubilant and
harmonious.

Farther and farther into the valley we flashed in our
lightning car, and even my inexperienced eye could
see the change in the erect dead. Many of the figures
were taller; the attitude was often overbearing and
arrogant, and the expression was generally mean or
cunning or truculent like so many European faces when
surprised in unconscious repose. The farther we re-
ceded, the more familiar the forms and features seemed
to become, so like were they to the normal human be-
ings of our Western world. Animalism, sensuous-
ness, rapacity, vindictiveness, cruelty, fanaticism grew
more and more frequent, the nearer to the primitive
graveyard we approached. At last on the faces of the
dead that had been dug out of their old tombs there
was the manifest touch of the ape, the tiger, the wolf,
or the snake. I shuddered to see withal the regularity
of the features and the stature and grace of the figures.
They came nearest of all to the ideal beauty and the
haughty bearing of aristocratic Europe. It scarcely
needed the explanation of Oolmo to see that the body
had then been developed at the expense of the soul.
Underneath the handsome and generous outlines lurked
the beast that had entered into the making of ancestry.

Fialume 71

Splendid animals they had been ; and, as our inter-
preter explained, given up to war and field sports and
at intervals debauchery, or to the over-reaching of
trade and money-making, or to the subtleties and false-
hoods of political life. They belonged to the age just
before the great emigrations. As we took our way
back on the other side of the valley, I could notice how
rapidly these lordly animal forms disappeared, and
yielded to the compact little figures, irregular features,
and divine expression of face I had grown accustomed
to in the L,imanorans.

The dead were grouped in families and in order of
time after the epoch of exiling, and a student could
trace the growth of a talent or virtue. But many of the
family groups were small ; the line had suddenly ceased.
In these I could see after a time an occasional evidence
of atavism in the size or the sensuousness of the form,
and the interpreter explained how on the appearance
of this recession the right of having posterity had
ceased, or expatriation had occurred. The general
sense of the unfitness of an individual for fatherhood
or motherhood was too strong in the community to
need any expression in public resolve. Those who felt
this great misfortune fall upon them knew that their
race must be cut off; and they set themselves to eradi-
cate the desire of family life. If they could not eradi-
cate it and at the same time make effort to subdue their
retrogressive tendency, they had to go into exile. At
first action on the part of the community had been
needed. Now this expurgative policy worked almost
automatically and without friction.

When we had taken a comprehensive view of Fia-
lume, we entered another faleena, which had been sub-
stituted for our disabled car. We shot farewell glances

72 Limanora

at Oolmo and were off in the air before I had well dis-
entangled my thoughts from the last sight. Below us
receded the massive archways of the door and the foam-
ing streams at the entrance of the valley. The jubi-
lant music began to grow dim, and the dome shone
softly in the colours of the sunset. I thought we were
to be alone on our return journey, and began to ques-
tion Thyriel on some of the mysteries of the day. She
had not much light to throw on them, for she was her-
self a novice in life. But of a sudden like a flock of
homing pigeons a band of our comrades broke out into
the level sunlight from the mouth of Fialume; and
along with them other bands that streamed east and
north and south. Before long the western train had
overtaken us, and their voices rang like carolling at
heaven's gate. They saw our faleena land in safety at
the house of my proparents, and then, joined by Thy-
riel, they streamed away through the twilight sky, ever
breaking off into more and more widely separated
groups till they were lost across the horizon, or in the
darkness of some distant valley.

Week after week, and at last day after day, we took
our path through the azure to Fialume. For several
years under the direction of Oolmo we became ac-
quainted with the history of Linianora, and saw the
gradual development of the civilisation and of the hu-
man form and faculty. We came to feel how naturally
ends followed means chosen in the mind and frame of
man, as in the plant creation and in the other animals.
We saw how creative had been this community, not in
the arts merely, but in that art of all arts, human
nature. They had moulded generation after generation
to higher and ever higher purpose. How poor and
subsidiary seemed all the sciences when compared with

Fialume 73

this great practical science, the knowledge to mould
man into any required form, to bend his energies ever
upwards! Every week there grew upon us the con-
sciousness that there was no more plastic material in the
whole world than the human soul, when it had reached
a certain stage of development.

Oolmo traced for us each new faculty and power and
virtue to its starting-point, and showed us how feeble
it was to begin with, and how rapidly it grew when
once artificial effort was turned upon it. At first it was
the physical powers that he drew our attention to; in
family after family, for example, he showed us how the
capacity of flight had been acquired, and how the hu-
man frame had gradually become adapted to it; the
body grew lighter, the shoulder and breast muscles
stronger, the bones hollower, the arms longer, and the
legs shorter, with greater strength at the heels.

He acknowledged that there was something peculiar
in Limanora that made this adaptation easier; a mag-
netism seemed to come from the earth that made the
force of gravitation less; there was also something
more exhilarating in the atmosphere and climate that
differentiated it from all other lands. This explained
why I had so rapidly acquired the tripping, noiseless
gait I had so admired when first I saw Noola. There
had been a time in the history of the earth when the
human body was so light and agile in proportion to its
size that a few coincidences in nature, as, for example,
the increase of swift land and tree enemies, would
have made it ultimately winged. That was the geo-
logical epoch, when, after a period of great contraction
and increase of density (the period of the huge saurians
and other monsters of the prime), the orb had, through
volcanic explosions within it and the impact of myriads

74 Limanora

of aerolites on its crust, expanded its texture and par-
tially volatilised its internal elements. Since then it
has been cooling down within, and thus growing less
in size, though losing none of its mass; this can be
seen in the twistings and foldings of the rocks and the
enormous wrinkles on its surface. The result has been
that animals, and men with them, have been growing
heavier for their size. The possibility of man becom-
ing a flying race has passed away. Land and sea
animals have no longer the chance of developing into
birds of the air; and even some of the tribes of winged
things have almost surrendered their prerogative of
flight; nothing but embryo and unused wings remain
to them. It is only in exceptional spots like Limanora,
where the magnetic conditions and the spongy nature
of the interior of the earth lessen the force of gravita-
tion, that men could ever acquire the power of artificial
flight with any ease. By dint of the application of
enormous force, and of inventive mechanical power,
men in other lands may master the art of aerial voyag-
ing; but it will never become an accomplishment of the
individual; there will be too much strain and stress for
it ever to grow a pleasant mode of travel.

Thus Oolmo flashed light upon the past and the
future as we traversed the groves of Fialume. We grew
familiar with the great forces of the universe, and their
bearing upon the problems of mankind, and gained the
true perspective of existence. I felt that Europe was
but standing still, reform herself and advance in science
and art and civilisation as quickly as she might.
European man himself was not progressing, but only
the external results of his individual efforts. It would
take ten thousand years for the huge nations of Europe
to make the step upwards that these islanders made in

Fialume 75

a day. Material progress meant nothing to the Lima-
norans unless it meant also the progress of the men
themselves in capacity, in power of attaining higher
and higher goals.

Year by year I came nearer to the special purpose of
my education. As we passed over the family groups
of the island, and learned their sciences and arts, both
Thyriel and myself began to feel drawn to one branch
of investigation above all others. Every family had a
special department of the civilisation assigned to it,
and for generations it had cultivated this. To prevent
narrowness of view in its members, and to enable all to
understand the value and purpose of the work of each,
a long tract of their youth was devoted to a bird's-eye
view of the departments of human knowledge and pro-
gress. And, that no section of life might be left at the
mercy of accident, there worked with the representa-
tives of every family one or two supernumeraries.
Thus new blood was introduced, for the alien was gen-
erally chosen from a family not even distantly con-
nected, and had such a nature and temperament as
would be likely to lead to marriage and to the best re-
sults in posterity.

There was one family grove to which I was specially
drawn. The faces of the dead seemed to me exquisitely
beautiful; the natures that shone through their petri-
fied bodies attracted me with tenfold power. Ever}-
day as I entered Fialume I felt inclined to bend my
steps thither, and the close of the day generally found
me amongst them. Oolmo tried with some amusement
to himself to break me of the habit, which yet grew
stronger and stronger. And Thyriel showed the same
tendency. Perhaps one feature which gave great at-
traction to the place was its seclusion; it was almost

76 Limanora

the only family grove that had not two or three study-
ing the records. Here we were generally left to our
own companionship; for Oolmo had often to go when
we arrived there; and, with our common tastes, we
found the time far too short.

At last I came upon the explanation. We were
studying the growth of some feature through the gen-
erations, and I had remarked to Thyriel how like she
was to this family in character and appearance, when
suddenly the foliage parted near where we stood and
disclosed three figures, two of whom seemed to my un-
discriminative eyes facsimiles of the last of the group
which had been ireliumised. The feeling of worship
was aroused in me, for I felt in them the beautiful
nature of Thyriel, and besides this the atmosphere of
years and experience mellowing it and making it seem
loftier and more divine. The third was different and
yet as noble, and when I gazed into her face I found
the solution of a problem that had begun to perplex
me, the source of those characteristics of Thyriel which
made her different from the two others and from the
family group. The last was her mother; the other two
were her father and aunt. This was the treasure-house
and sleeping place of her ancestry. Her own relation-
ship had instinctively drawn her to it, and my natural
kinship with her had attracted me there.

We were now to begin the special study which was
to make us useful working members of the community,
filling our own places in it, and serving its great and
final purpose with our own labour and thought. Many
years would we have to spend in this secluded grove
mastering the knowledge and achievements of this
family. Its distinctive name was L,eomo, which meant
earth-seers, and its department was the study of the

Fialume 77

crust and inner movements of our orb. It was one of
the peculiarities of all Limanoran science that it was
art too; nothing was lost; every investigation or dis-
covery or law had practical issue; and it was the duty
of the investigator to find out how his work bore upon
the progress of the race to its final aim. As I saw
farther and got deeper into this study I discovered that
much which had seemed purely speculative was most
practical and relevant to the purpose of the race. A
shallow view would have rejected nine tenths of it as
useless application of the energies, as mere fancy think-
ing. The wider my knowledge, the more my admira-
tion of the far-sight of these investigators grew. They
seemed to me to have almost the gift of prophecy as
they looked at the facts they accumulated and the con-
clusions they tried to draw.

It was easy to follow them for every generation
had reduced the ancestral writings and thoughts and
achievements to the briefest available form, and in-
dexed all that previous generations had done. It was
the duty of every new student of a family, after he had
finished his general education and seen the advances
made in other branches, to bring all his ancestors' re-
searches and suggestions into relation to these, and to
place a brief account of them on record in the latest
phraseology and scientific light, so that any alien
student might read or hear with understanding. There
was thus in every family grove a summary of all that
was known or achieved in its department of science or
life. And this great graveyard was also the library of
the race, so classified and summarised and indexed that
any man could take a complete survey of its contents
in a few years. There was the living index, too, avail-
able in every grove. Anything that was obscure could

?8 Limanora

be at once explained by the representatives of the
family. Besides these there were families whose duty
it was to supervise the relationships of the various
sciences and branches; they could point out to the
investigators how far their work tended to overlap
or interfere, what was futile in their efforts, what
directions had still to be taken and what paths to be
traversed. They permitted no piece of work to be
wasted ; everything was correlated by them to the pur-
pose of the race and to its contemporary efforts. The
boundary-lines of the various departments were defined
and mapped by them. They were the organisers of
research, the dividers and economisers of intellectual
labour.

But they themselves had their separate functions and
duties. Some had the faculty of order exceptionally
developed; and they were the classifiers of the com-
munity and of the work of the community. Others
had the logical powers in especial vigour; and they
followed out the philosophy of the race, the correlation
of the ideas and of the lines of reasoning. A third
group consisted of those with a dominant imagination;
these looked- into the future; they performed some of
the functions of imaginative writers in Europe, sketch-
ing out imaginary routes for the race and for each
family into the unknown; but they also covered a much
wider field; they put into form and expression schemes
and projects such as European men of action of the
most romantic careers have often attempted to carry
out, but have seldom been able to put into words;
these were not allowed to interfere with action, but
the ideas, plans, and romances they invented and put
into shape were tested and accepted or rejected by the
practical men whose sphere they touched. Imagina-

Fialume 79

tion, it was held by the L,imanorans, was apt to be a
futile, if not mischievous, faculty through want of its
being ranged on the side of utility; and yet, if tram-
melled and yoked to the necessity of practice in the
individual, it came to be stifled. They specially culti-
vated it in these families in order that it should have
full scope and development, but took care, by ranging
these families with those that superintend the purpose
and progress of the race, that their romances should
have full relevancy to the goal of all their efforts.
Many of the projects and ideas which seemed at first
the most fantastic were found after many generations
to be sound and most possible of realisation.

One of the striking features of the civilisation was
the complete absence of a literary class or profession
or group of families. They smiled at the " pure frip-
pery " of European literature, which used imagination
as a mere means of entertainment. It seemed a com-
plete inversion of the natural order of things to make
that faculty which was the prerogative of everyone who
could speak, and the servant of the highest purpose of
life, into a special art to suit the pleasure of the idler
hours. They held that the man who had thought a
thing out could express it best. So they trained up
every citizen to the fullest power of lucid and final ex-
pression. In their language, so perfect was it, there
was one best way of saying a thing; and everyone who
knew the language aright and understood the thing
could find this best way. Style as a matter of mere
expression they laughed at as linguistic trickery; the
force and life of everything lay in the idea, and the
expression grew out of that and was a part of it, as
the colour was a part of the flower. It was only a
clumsy and inchoate language that could admit of style

8o Limanora

or literature as a special art; and it was trifling with
one of the most divine faculties to prostitute it to the
entertainment of leisure hours; it was to class imagina-
tion with the arts of the mimic, the buffoon, and the
juggler.

Art for art's sake, one of the latest creeds of the
writers of Europe, was to them almost blasphemy. It
made the garment of ideas, the garb of human progress,
into a separate entity, and the servants of God into the
tailors of human folly, the dress more than the figure
it clothed and the body more than the soul. litera-
ture without the intensity of the loftiest purpose of the
race was but a tinkling cymbal. Expression was the
gift of nature to every civilised man, and woe to
the race that neglected it in any of its individuals, the
race that should divorce it from its ideas, that let the
men who write filch the glory of those who think!

Ivike strong beliefs had they about the profession of
teaching as separate from parenthood and investigation.
It meant disloyalty on the part of most citizens to their
most immediate duties. Who could develop the in-
stincts of youth and be so deeply interested in his
future welfare as those who were bound to him by the
ties of nature ? And then, when he had matured and
needed the wider education, who could give it him
so well as those who were most familiar with its special
objects and themes? If he was to follow the art and
knowledge of some other family, the sooner he went
under the tutelage of its representatives after his intel-
lectual life began the better. The only portion of their
youth that the young men and women could spend
with profit under others than their parents or proparents
was the period of general knowledge, of summarising
the results of the whole past. The representative of

Fialume 81

one of the supervising families alone could give with
ease a survey of the whole field of knowledge and art
and action. They and they alone were in any way an
approach to the profession of teaching, and they were
saved from the petrifying influence of pedagogy by
their wider duties in correlating the sciences and arts,
the fields of knowledge and action. Thus reason and
the emotions were kept from getting benumbed by the
vanity of a too easy superiority. The beings they
pitied most in the world were the despot and the pro-
fessional teacher; for these get buried in unreality be-
fore the life is out of them, and are so unquestionably
supreme that nothing but what is pleasing to their
minds dare approach them. They fall out of relation
to truth, and it is difficult for them ever to regain that
wholesome fear of contradiction and that shyness before
destiny which constitute the essence of sanity; they
have to become intolerant. The schoolmaster soon
becomes intellectually barren; the despot soon falls the
victim of luxury and of illusion. For the sake of the
grown men and women who might be sacrificed to it,
as well as of the children and youth, they abolished the
profession of teacher. Individual training was the only
true foundation of a sound progress. Two might be
permitted to form a companionship in education and
study, just as two might form the friendship of mar-
riage; but that was only when the periods of possible
atavism had been safely traversed. Nor must they be
wholly given up to their comradeship; the parental
influence and solitude must continue to govern their
lives.

Thyriel and I had become educational companions
and friends; but every item of our education was
supervised without our noticing or feeling galled by it.

6

82 Limanora

There was no prying into details; but every change
in our character and every stage in our training was
tested at the periodical investigation of the citizens.
Our parents or proparents took the keenest interest in
all that we did and all that we tended to become.

Now, that our specialisation had begun, we were
put wholly under the care of Thyriel's parents and
family. I still returned to the home of my proparents,
but spent the hours of training with the Leomo. There
had evidently been discovered in the preliminary in-
vestigation of my faculties some especially suited to
the pursuit of earth-seeing. From the beginning of
my journeys to Fialume I had been attached to this
family of earth-seers, and the result confirmed the
decision; my tastes all developed in this same direc-
tion, and the more I penetrated into the mysteries of
the science and craft, the more deeply interested in it
I became. Every day, under the guidance of my new
friends, I listened to the voices of their ancestors stored
up on irelium tablets; for these tablets, when placed in
a voice instrument, reproduced the exact sounds which
had engraved the letters upon them. Their written
alphabet was in fact a natural one; the letters were the
forms produced by the sounds themselves when uttered
by an instrument that blew upon loose particles of
irelium arranged on a vibrating disc of the same metal.
By a simple process the particles, when they took their
form, were permanently fixed to the disc, which then
became an everlasting record, easily read by any L,ima-
noran; or, when placed in the voice instrument, speak-
ing the words into his ear. This voice instrument was
a kind of organ, whose minute keys and stops were
easily controlled by the ridge of letters.

I ever preferred to listen to the records of the past

Fialume 83

instead of reading them; for I never attained great
facility in deciphering the letters because of my own
long familiarity with the English alphabet and writing.
But Thyriel could read the tablets with great ease;
I came to prefer her reading to the sound of her an-
cestors' voices although these gave fuller meaning to
the ideas they communicated, and it was pleasant to
feel that she was listening with me and not tiring her
throat. Our minds seemed to become one, as we sat
silent and motionless with ears intent on the statue of
some one of her forefathers. There was a strong mag-
netism from the dead minds gradually welding our
souls together.

Yet there was nothing personal or em'otional in our
studies. For years they were chiefly historical, watch-
ing the growth of earth-science through the generations,
seeing the share that each member had in its develop-
ment. How little they knew of it even up to the time
of the exilings ! The earliest ancestors groped amongst
barren facts and their classifications. They named the
rocks and the elements of the rocks, and speculated on
the order of their formation; they told the story of the
growth of glaciers in the original Antarctic land from
which their ancestors had migrated, and tried to ex-
plain the origin and development of the strange archi-
pelago in which they lived. But they saw no practical
application of the resulting theories: even when they
knew the stratum and its trend, they often failed in
their directions as to where certain minerals would be
found in it.

Still the strides made by the family both in the
knowledge and its application were marvellous, since
the island had been purified and the true purpose of
their civilisation was known. An instrument that I

84 Limanora

had grown accustomed to during the previous or gen-
eral stage of my education enabled me now to see at a
glance the improvements of each age or generation.
It was the ammerlin, which might be translated his-
toroscope. It focussed for the eye and ear any periods
of the past. The whole pageant of some section of the
history of any man, science, or object could be flashed
stereoscopically in a few minutes on a dark surface,
whilst all the sounds that accompanied the scenes
would be reproduced in any required pitch and tone.
It was one of the duties of the students and representa-
tives to take numberless sun pictures and sound pictures
of all the important scenes in the life of the family and
in the development of their science and art and instru-
ments. In order to reproduce any scene, the two long
strips of irelium that contained the series of momentary
pictures of it were made to rotate as swiftly as they had
rotated when receiving the impressions, and the sun
pictures being transparent, light and magnifying glasses
threw them life-size on a wall opposite the spectator;
the lightning movement produced the full effect of
action in life; and, as all the tints of the scene had also
been impressed on the strips, there was nothing want-
ing to produce the illusion of life but the voices and the
sounds. These, too, had been taken on an irelium
strip and this, when placed in a voice instrument,
added all that was needed to make the whole scene
live. It was the duty of the students in each genera-
tion to single out the most striking and representative
series and have them ready mounted in the instruments,
that any new scholar might in a few days take a bird's-
eye view of the whole development of the family.
Thus was I enabled to sit and study the past as if I had
been a contemporary and eye-witness of it. The very

Fialume 85

music that accompanied and harmonised each act and
scene was faithfully reproduced as loud or as low as I
desired. I had but to touch a certain spring in the
historoscope, and raise or lower the tone.

It was little wonder that we so rapidly covered the
history of the family and its achievements. By means
of the work of former students we were able to avoid
all the mistakes and unessential details of the route
they had traversed; and Thyriel's friends pointed
out every pitfall that edged the road, every by-path
that led only into the darkness or into some inextricable
labyrinth. Our steps were watched with infinite care;
for, with all the knowledge and skill we had already
acquired, we were but infants on the threshold of a
universe of darkness. What was twilight in the future
to our guides was to us midnight blackness. That
was no science, they held, which did not flash light
upon the gloom before us; and their whole efforts were
bent on turning every fact and law into a prophecy and
every student into a foreseer as well as a seer in his
own science. The limited faculties of man fenced in
by narrow bounds the future into which it was possible
for them to see; but they were ever extending these
bounds and creeping towards the infinite.

It took but a few years to master the recorded lore
of the L,eomo, the work of our predecessors had made
it so easy, and it was an epoch in our existence when
we began the practical part of our training. We were
by no means done with Fialume, but less time was now
devoted to its historical and theoretical studies. I well
remember the morning when our guardians and guides
informed us we were fit to see the practical applica-
tions of the science throughout the island. Taking
some new apparatus, they embarked me in a kind of

86 Limanora

faleena which had been invented since I came to the
island. The families of imagination had long ago
suggested^ it, and one of the families engaged in the
development of methods of flight had just succeeded
in perfecting its mechanism and making it easy to
manage. This aerial car had no wings, but rose by
means of the many vacuum tubes which were the most
important part of its impelling machinery. A power-
ful electric engine created and destroyed the vacuums
many hundred times a minute. Bach tube sucked in
the air ahead and expelled it with great violence at the
stern of the car. Both actions aided in propelling the
faleena. The result was that, though not so graceful
as the old winged car, it went with much greater swift-
ness. Indeed, laden though we were, we kept pace
easily with the flight of my companions and guides
through the air; and its parachute attachments ob-
viated any risk, even if all the tubes should by accident
become ineffective. Its chief disadvantage was that it
could not rise out of the denser air of the lower atmo-
sphere, and at the same time keep up its great speed.
The old style of faleena, or farfaleena, as it was called,
to distinguish it from its new rival, the corfaleena, was
still kept in use for higher journeys, and the flight-
families set themselves the problem of inventing a
means of propulsion through space without the aid of
air. One dealt with the possibilities of electric cur-
rents, and experimented on the method of alternating
attraction and repulsion, using the repulsion in the
rear of the car and the attraction in front. Another
dealt with the possibilities of the rays of light that were
ever traversing space, experimenting on their power of
starting machinery in vacuo and keeping it in rotation.
A third made effort to test the capacities of the ether,

Fialume 87

which was the basis and medium of all things, a more
difficult and problematical path of investigation, yet
one not to be abandoned without certain proof of its
impossibility; formally apparently insoluble problems
had been solved in a manner that made incredulity
hide its head.

CHAPTER VII

LKOMARIE

AS I was attached to Leomarie or the science of
earth-seeing, I did not follow up their experi-
ments in the building of air-cars; I only saw the re-
sults when at last they came out perfect from their
hands, and greatly admired the easy and swift action
of their corfaleena. Over the hills and valleys and
plains we flew close enough to see what was going on
upon the earth below. Again and again we passed
over long wisps of steam or columns of dense smoke.
I conjectured that the steam indicated the heat wells
like that which penetrated the rock near the house of
my proparents, and supplied every chamber with heat
or power as required. It went down some miles into
the crust of the earth, and could be closed or opened
at will by a huge lever worked by the steam it emitted
itself. The denser brooms of smoke I took to indicate
the sinking of their artesian power wells by the
leomoran.

For I had seen ours being mined; I had seen the
entrance of the great irelium tube into the earth, ring
within ring, and its slow but inevitable work from day
to day and week to week. The principle of this leo-
moran or earth perforator had been found by investiga-

88

Leomarie 89

tion of the anatomy and method of work of the pholas
or rock-boring shell, partly chemical, partly mechani-
cal. The edge of the lowest ring was like a sharp-
toothed file that, as it rotated by means of power
applied from the centre of force, wore its way gradually
into the rock, the ridges of the file being as hard as the
diamond. An inner ring-file was attached to it on the
inside, and between the two was let down a certain
chemical compound, which by the friction of the files
produced little explosions in the rock below and thus
quickened the process. Other ring-files followed in
the same way. Another chemical compound, differing
according to the character of the rock to be attacked,
was let down in the space within the concentric rings,
and rapidly decayed the rock so that it ascended like a
column of thick black smoke. After all the ring-files
were at work, the leomoran needed little guidance;
for by an application of the principle of the spectro-
scope, its use of the chemicals according to the nature
of the rock became automatic. As soon as the volatil-
ised mineral that ascended out of the rings changed its
character, the beams of light that passed through it
changed the spectrum; and the new spectrum in-
fluenced a certain solution that controlled a thread,
and this thread set free a stream of the proper chemical
compound down the leomoran.

A still more striking use of the spectrum was the
linoklar or spectroscope analyst and recorder. It ana-
lysed the vapours that ascended from the tubes, and
recorded their spectra on a moving strip of irelium
that was guided by the descent of the leomoran into
the earth. Thus anyone could see what strata were
passed through in any given time and the extent of
the strata. But the linoklar did much more than this;

90 Limanora

whenever it struck any vein that had the much-desired
irelium in it in any quantity, its spectrum released a
spring which opened a small tube; through this
streamed the irelium vapour into a cavity of the earth,
where by means of a purifier it deposited only the pure
metal. There was less demand for the other metals,
gold, silver, platinum, tin, copper, iron. But there
was also an arrangement for separating and depositing
their volatilised forms in other cavities. Thus they
were able to have more than they required of the
metals, and especially of irelium, the most precious
because the most adaptable of all.

I was now to see a further development of these
mining instruments. We winged our way to a part of
the coast which was farthest from the surrounding
islands and most easily protected from invaders by the
storm-cone. I noticed the exceptional lowness of the
sandy beach, as shelving as that on which I had
originally landed; there were none of the great bastions
of rock which, moulded with such symmetry of terrace
and escarpment, barred off all landing on the island.
We directed our course far up the mountain and
alighted on a rocky platform overlooking the sea.
The new apparatus had been sent after us in a faleena
and was now placed in position. A cylinder was
erected on the ground and attached by machinery to
wires and pipes that had been laid from the centre of
force. But this was unlike the old leomoran in having
the mouth tightly closed, and I soon saw the principle
on which the new perforator was to work. The air
was exhausted in the cylinder, and then a powerful
stream of electricity was made to pass through a piston
constructed of innumerable wires which kept moving
with lightning rapidity over the surface of the rock at

Leomarie 91

the bottom. The success of the experiment soon mani-
fested itself; for, as soon as a spring was touched, a
valve that separated the end of a projecting tube from
the air-tight cylinder was opened, and out streamed a
dense column into the atmosphere above. The spring
was afterwards managed automatically so that as soon
as the red-hot electric piston had eroded enough of the
rock and volatilised it, the valve sprang open, and the
moment the vapour and smoke had all escaped, it was
shut, and the air was immediately exhausted.

We returned day after day to the place and found
that the new perforator, or tirleomoran as it was called,
worked with ten times the swiftness of the old instru-
ment. The chief objections to it were that the metal
vapours were denser and more offensive, and that the
irelium cylinders had to be oftener renewed because of
the great friction and the intensity of the electric heat.
The one was obviated by a longer smoke-tube and an
application of a vent of wind from the storm-cone; the
other was obviated by longer cylinders and refrigera-
tive packing between two of their layers of irelium.
But the strangest result — strangest for me at least —
was to come. The tirleomoran descended miles beyond
the usual force well into the crust of the earth, at a
great rate of speed, and I soon saw preparations for
some change. Great channels of their usual metal
were laid down to the beach, and irelium barriers
erected in the sea along the shelving shore from bas-
tion to bastion. By the greater rapidity of the descent,
the increase of the proportion of their favourite metal,
and the ease with which the electric current volatilised
the material below, our guides judged that they had
reached rock that was already molten. Before long
there began to ooze out of the smoke- tube a red-hot

92 Limanora

stream, that trickled its way down the slope. Then
the air-tight lid was burst off the cylinder, out of it
came the electric piston on a wave of red-hot lava, and
down the channels the thick stream of molten rock
flowed till it reached the barriers in the sea. There
with vast columns of steam it cooled and solidified,
forming a new and stronger rampart to check the in-
flowing fire. Day after day we found that the beach
was disappearing, and in its place, when the steam
cleared, wre could see that the great gap in the bastion-
works of the island was filled up.

This was the first of their lava wells I had seen. Its
operations explained to me the massive symmetry of
the rocky shores and the cyclopean terraces and shoots
down the mountain-sides, that had, I thought, been
either chiselled by tens of thousands of years of slavish
labour, or laid by the hands of a race of giants now
vanished from the earth. This little people was itself
the Vulcan that turned the bowels of the world into
smelting-works and used the mighty forces lying
underneath the crust of our orb with the ease- of a
smith at his forge. What had the lyimanorans to fear
from invaders with even the mightiest war-engines
that had ever been invented ? They had made them-
selves fortifications which would outlast the attacks of
any human invention. When the beetling circle of
precipices was complete around their island who could
land troops, even if they evaded the blast of the storm-
cone? To the Limanorans themselves the height of
their shores was no disadvantage; in fact it gave them
easy starting-points for their wing expeditions; they
could plunge from the jutting cliffs into the air and so
gain impetus for their flight.

Thus had they been able to destroy that spirit of

UN1V
^_

Leomarie 93

militarism which, after a certain stage, is the implacable
foe of true progress. It is based on two of the most
childish and most primitive of forces in the human
breast, combativeness and the passion for display.
Hence the impossibility of stamping out the contagion.
Ever and anon in the former history of the island the
age of peace seemed to have begun; but marauders
from abroad would land and stir the instinct of brigand-
age and make an army and a military leader necessary.
Thenceforward again all the arrangements of the com-
munity were made subordinate to the ambition of the
soldier. An intrusion of savagery and brute force,
however veiled in glory and the panoplies of civilisa-
tion, is irresistible by the powers of peace. Only slow
and silent conquest of the armed power brought back
progress in peaceful arts again, again to be maintained
and thrown back from some external accident. Not
that they ever pretended that they could eject struggle
out of their life, but they did aim to raise the plane of
conflict and competition. Never could this people
have entered on the rapid development of their powers
without their lava ramparts and their storm-cone to
keep off all occasions of militarism.

These lava wells had still other uses. Out of their
flow were made the rock foundations on which the
houses of this people were built. It puzzled me for
years to know how they succeeded in making their
immense platforms and terraces out of the hardest trap.
Their mansions stood out from the precipices and cliffy
sides of the mountain on isolated plateaus that gave
the inmates free view on every side and free circula-
tion of air around. They rose picturesque and romantic
from the top of lonely rocks, like the castles of the
Rhine, dominating the whole locality. Down the

94 Limanora

rocky foundations poured at times torrents of water
from the sluice-gates of the mountain, cleansing or
cooling the surroundings; yet never was there any
danger for these everlasting ramparts.

Another use to which these lava wells were put was to
modify the temperature. They were generally opened
and let flow in the coolest months of winter, and the
red-hot cascades falling into the sea heated it to such
an extent that the climate of the whole island was
mellowed and tempered. From the wells far up the
slope of the mountain the lava flow had been so guided
and moulded that immense channels had been made
down to the edge of the cliffs, with sides as lofty as the
precipitous shores themselves. Down these were shot
in summer great avalanches of mountain snow right
into the ocean, so tempering the strength of the sum-
mer heat.

But these were only subsidiary uses of the tappings
of the central earth fires. Their main and original
purpose was to relieve the perturbations of Lilaroma.
It was one of the chief duties of the Leomo to watch
over the destiny of their island, which was volcanic
in its origin, though it had been greatly added to in
former ages by the coral insect. Lava-streams had
overspread the coral, and then the myriads of minute
architects had thrust out their structures farther and
farther into the sea and thus the lowlands had been
broadly extended, while the red-hot layers of lava
added massiveness to the body of the island. Yet it
was continually shaken by earthquakes and threatened
with partial if not complete disaster. It was the func-
tion of Leomarie to watch the approach of these earth-
quakes and guard against them. The Leomo had the
most delicate instruments for recording every tremor

Leomarie 95

of the earth's crust. They had also thermometers and
electrometers down their heat wells and lava wells,
and the^e automatically recorded at the surface every
variation of the heat and magnetism of the earth.
They had classified through many centuries all the
preliminary and concomitant circumstances of earth-
quakes, and had found and formulated certain causal
relations amongst them. Thus the minutest symptom
of change in the records made by their instruments
roused them to watchfulness. They were soon able to
tell in what direction the explosive materials were ac-
cumulating and how far below the surface of the earth ;
then, when they had fixed with more or less definite-
ness the time they had to spare, they began sinking
lava wells right into the perturbed lake of fire. The
vent acted as safety-valve; the shakings of the island
ceased as the steam roared forth, and the molten rock
began to yeast down the side- of the mountain. All
danger was past for another period of time. Again
and again throughout the past ages the L,eomo had
saved the island from the ravages of earthquake and
uncontrolled lava-streams from the crater of Lilaroma.
Never did they intermit their vigilance or cease to ad-
vance their knowledge of the earth and its habits and
laws. It seemed to me at first that nothing could occur
in the crust of our planet which they would not foresee.
I came afterwards to know the limits of Leomarie, and
the reasons why they pushed almost feverishly forward
to further knowledge. They were ever afraid that
something unforeseen might occur and threaten the
stability of their land and the progress towards the
nobler life.

Once in the dark ages before the great exilings an
appalling disaster had occurred which ploughed deep

96 Limanora

into the consciousness of the people the necessity for
the development of this earth science. Their central
city stood upon a great plateau up the slope of Lila-
roma. Within recorded memory there had been no
great outburst from the mountain; and the inhabitants
travelled fearlessly up to its rim and down the bowl of
its crater. At times there had been slight spittings of
ashes and once or twice a new fumarole or hot spring
or even lava fountain had opened at some point on
the mountain slope; but these were all at a distance
from the bustling, luxurious city; and most of them
had awakened slight notice. The volcano indeed had
been practically quiescent since the great migration
from the Antarctic regions and the sealing of the archi-
pelago by the circle of fog. The citizens were keeping
one of their annual feasts, and were lapped in luxurious
ease and pleasure. They had been exhilarated by a
long period of prosperity and a recent victory over the
savage clan that inhabited one of the adjacent islands.
The country people and a number of hermits living in
lonely parts of L,imanora had been alarmed by various
premonitory symptoms, sultry clouds turbaning the
head of L,ilaroma, tremors in the earth more and more
threateningly repeated, great and unaccountable dis-
turbances in the sea, and a hot, heavy, brooding atmos-
phere around the whole island. Some of them came to
the city and warned the revellers to be prepared for some
catastrophe; but they were waved aside as dreamers,
mere superstitious disturbers of life and its traffic.
Half the city was gathered together in the central
market-place to see a great spectacle, when the earth
shook beneath them. They fell on their faces and
cried to their gods; but it was in vain. The market
stood upon a plateau high above the rest of the city,

Leomarie 97

overlooking the ocean. Like a cap this platform was
blown into the air, and all the pleasure- seekers vanished
like smoke. Out on the sea and here and there on the
land a rain of dust fell mingled with minute pieces of
human flesh ; but never was any one of the gathered
thousands found ; and as if to obliterate the traces of
her ghastly work, the mountain sent down a broad
stream of lava, which filled up the gulf where the
market-place had been, and sealed up the dust-buried
city, preserving it for after-ages like a fly in amber.
Those who escaped destruction fled, some to distant
parts of Limanora, some to other islands; but all were
buried for centuries in grovelling superstition. It was
out of the hermits and the country people that a new na-
tion was built up, which set itself as a first duty to es-
tablish Leomarie, that it should not be taken unawares
by any repetition of this great catastrophe. Nor has
it ever recurred, although there have been many pre-
monitory symptoms. The lava wells or vents eased
the labours of the internal fires and saved the island.

Their new and deeper wells, driven by the tirleo-
moran, and reaching the internal fires, gave them
greater sense of security. Irelium floats were let down
which would not be injured by the great heat, and
these, communicating with an indicator at the mouth,
told of every disturbance in the surface of the lake of
fire. All the indicators were connected with the centre
of force, and automatically recorded there all they had
to tell. The same system of centralised record placed
the various indications of the clinicians or earth-sensors
at every moment ready to the hand of the Leomo.
These clinicians were down every force-well and told
every variation in the heat, the density of the air, the
kind of vapour, the magnetism, and the movement of

98 Limanora

the crust of the earth. No change in the earth below
the island down to a distance of thirty or forty miles
(the latter the greatest depth they had reached) was
neglected. Kvery indication was properly tabulated
and classified, and year was compared with year and
month with month, till the meaning and importance
of every change were exactly known. The furthest
records of the past, as well as those more recent, were
daily consulted in order to find the generalisation that
would fit any new symptom. The Leomo felt daily the
pulse of lyilaroma as a doctor would that of his most
valued fever patient. They knew that they had the
fate of the race in their hands, and no indication was
of too little importance for them to consider. What
would all the strivings and labours of the nation come
to if any laxity on their part should allow such a vol-
canic catastrophe to recur as had destroyed the capital
of old?

CHAPTER VIII

IN studying the practical aims and issues of earth
science, I was taught to manage their apparatus,
and to interpret every tremor in the earth's crust and
every indication of the instruments. I had already
been taught to make their apparatus, for my physical
discipline had begun several years before I was ad-
mitted to Fialume. It was in fact one of their primary
maxims that muscular exercises should go on contem-
poraneously with intellectual and spiritual pursuits,
that no citizen should be allowed to neglect for even a
day the development of the body, intimately as the soul
was interwoven with it. As soon as I was thoroughly
tested and put through my course of probation, the
training of my muscles was begun, and along with the
magnetic moulding of my brain-tissues went the de-
velopment of the force-tissues of the body and the
powers of my senses. But no one was permitted to
enter their great practical university or workshop till
he had become a certain devotee of the race. The
mysteries and arts and crafts which gave the nation its
peculiar powers could not be communicated to anyone
who might by some change become an alien. It was
thus that many years of residence in L,imanora passed

99

ioo Limanora

before I was admitted to one of the marvels of the
island, the great valley of Rimla.

I well remember the evening of my initiation. The
night work was as a rule done by the younger men
and women of the community; the elders took their
turn at the machinery by day, as they had to husband
sleep during the hours of darkness and silence. I had
often wondered whither went my proparents at a fixed
hour every day; they vanished in the distance as the
sun began to wester, and they returned at evening with
high colour in their cheeks and the look of having used
their muscles with a will. Their physical life seemed
to take new impetus from these expeditions.

One day on their return they told me that I was to
be admitted to Rimla, which they explained to mean
the centre of force. The mature judgment of the com-
munity had decided that I could now be fully trusted.
My practical and muscular education was to begin. I
was to set out that evening with a band of young
workmen who kept the first watch of the night.

The sun had scarcely set when my escort arrived ;
and, as with my slow powers of locomotion I could not
be expected to keep up with them, I was placed in
one of their flight-cars. I had no companion, for the
whole band flew in front and drew the car by some
magnetic power unseen; and it was so light- hung and
so balanced by wings and domes and parachutes that
it seemed capable of being the sport of every wind.
Over the central ridge of the island we swept towards a
distant slope of Lilaroma. Suddenly underneath me
in the growing darkness there shone out in a deep
broad valley a vast dome of light, transparent enough
to reveal the flitting shadows underneath it. It seemed
the laboratory of a world. Innumerable streams flashed

Rimla 101

under its upper edge; they sped from the summits of
the surrounding hills, or across the gorges from other
and more distant ranges. I had seen as we flew hun-
dreds of noble aqueducts spanning the valleys with
their arches and columns, some of them thousands of
feet up the slopes of L,ilaroma. All the waters which
the great mountain gathered from the clouds of heaven
made their way towards this marvellous domed valley.
At its mouth there was a deep gorge, whether artificial
or natural was not clear to me then ; and through the
chasm leaped a river mightier than any I had ever
seen; it seemed to be on its way to the sea, but I could
not trace its course farther than its massive gateway
out of the valley. Underneath the dome I could see
vast wheels of irelium move at all levels; they seemed
so fragile that a pebble thrown at them would break
them; yet each turned spindles of enormous power,
which moved swifter than lightning. I soon saw that
all the intricate machinery was sheathed in casings of
their translucent metal, along which flowed a slow,
glutinous stream of some liquid that dripped through
perforations on all points of friction.

As we alighted, night fell, and the titanic crystal
workshop gleamed with a soft radiance that seemed to
come from no centres, but was diffused everywhere in
the manner of the sunlight or the atmosphere. It was
like a vast ice cave of the Arctic circle lit by brief and
splendid summer. Fairy-like yet vast, it seemed a
fabric of some dream-world; but the splash and hiss
of the forceful waters and the unresting motion of the
machinery made it all real enough. The noises were
by no means deafening ; they were subdued and musical
with a halo of mysterious whisper like the sounds of
nature on a bright day of summer. Nor was the sight

102 Limanora

bewildering to the eyes; there was too much symmetry
in it to perplex and dazzle.

My guides and companions tripped lightly and fear-
lessly through the labyrinth of movement till they
reached an edifice underneath the dome more elaborate
and majestic in its beauty than the noblest of Gothic
cathedrals; its towers and spires and pinnacles seemed
to aspire to the very stars as we looked up, and yet the
loftiest of them failed to reach the zenith of the vast
diaphanous roof. Towards this building radiated the
moving network of spindles and axles that the flashing
water-wheels turned, and out from it passed great trans-
parent tubes of metal, woven together fantastically into
a forest of gigantic trees and flowers. Nothing of this
arabesque of movement marred the colossal symmetry
of all beneath the crystal canopy. The church-like
building was the shrine of force. In it we found one
of the wise men of the elders seated on a high throne;
and beside him stood muscular forms ready to do his
behests. He laid his hand on a key-board of in-
numerable keys, each of which was marked with some
hieroglyphic. The attendants scattered to various
points along the mosaic floor, and watched the working
of the labyrinth of wires and tubes. At the touch of
the master the whole edifice vibrated, and a sound as
of the most sublime orchestration filled the vault. We
saw countless wheels and pistons move and flash be-
neath their transparent metal sheaths, and along each
tube, now lit as with starlight, we could watch the rush
of vapours or liquids towards their destination in the
various factories and houses in the valley and along the
mountain-side.

It was one of the masters of physical force who
manipulated the keys. He was controlling and har-

Rimla 103

monising the vast power that was concentrated in
Rimla, and, instead of the demoniac jarring of the
engines and machinery which I had been accustomed
to in the industrial centres of other lands, the sounds
of the marvellous vault made sweet concord that ever
varied with th'e transference of power from purpose to
purpose. He was the pointsman of the numberless
railroads of energy, and at the same time the musician
of the titanic workshop. His will disciplined and
guided both the generation and the distribution of all
the force of the island. Our troop took the place of
that which had been on guard through the sunset and
twilight, and separated in pairs throughout the val-
ley, each pair taking under its charge one section of
the labyrinthine movement. My comrade, Ooriel, the
cousin of Thyriel, was a youth of splendid build, the
strength of his upper limbs seeming almost bovine, his
shoulders and arms not too large for his size, yet giving
the impression of gigantic power. I soon saw how
much he could do. We were to inspect the generators
of force underneath the dome. He first led me to the
various streams which came leaping down the slopes
and cliffs. One of them from some cause only to be
ascertained at the cone of Lilaroma was swollen into a
yellow torrent that threatened to overflow its lava
banks and flood the valley. In a moment he saw the
danger, and rushed to the wing-dam dividing the upper
course and controlling the amount of water which
should flow down to its various wheels and the amount
which unused should find its way to the great exit. He
found that the separating barrier had lost its automatic
motion through the sudden increase of the overflow and
the intrusion of a huge, boulder that had come down
like a battering-ram upon it. He set me to guide the

104 Limanora

machinery and power that moved the dam to suit the
strength of the current, and then, fixing a narrow
irelium shield in the bottom of the channel, he leapt
into the torrent. The shield, I could see, keeping
erect just above him, shed the stones and boulders to
this side and that. Thus protected he raised a huge
hammer which he had taken with him and by three or
four well-directed blows split the obstacle into half a
dozen pieces; he then bent down and removed them
out of the way, and suddenly I felt the steering-gear
begin to work, and saw the dam swing round into the
channel leading to the centre of force, whilst the bulk
of the torrent found its way into the exit, which was
deeper and broader. The danger was past; but a
moment's hesitation, either in order to bring up the
heavier tools or to call other assistance, would have
ruined many of the great works upon the levels below
and stopped the whole of the operations of Rimla for
several days.

Ooriel shook the water from his garments as he leapt
out, and in a few minutes he was on his way with me
to the other brooks, cascades, and conduits which
gathered the aqueous forces of Lilaroma into this valley
of power. Not a drop that fell from the tributary
clouds about the head of the mountain but did its work
for this singular people; the moisture-lifting power of
the sun, and the force of gravitation that fought with
it were alike made the servants and yoke-fellows of the
L,imanorans.

They refused to waste the energy that nature gave
them so freely. This I saw more fully illustrated as
I followed Ooriel. Having inspected all the forms of
stream-power, he sped round to the side of the valley
nearest to the western shore of the island; there in a

Rimla 105

great cave or hollow in the rock, brilliantly lit, I saw
myriads of wires and cables concentrating from all
westward directions on an immense block of labramor
or irelium alloy. This, he explained to me, was the
great electric storage-battery of the waves. From the
north-west and the south-west came the chief storms
and currents that broke on the shores of the island; and
underneath the beetling cliffs of lava erected on the
western shores they had a line of long, lofty caves run-
ning some hundreds of feet underneath into the land;
in these huge vanes and water-wheels were hung from
the roofs and the higher portions of the sides; and the
waves as they ran in and out beat their paddles and
made them whirl with lightning swiftness. The mo-
tion thus communicated was turned by their electro-
generators into currents of electric force which found
its way by the network of wires and cables that I saw
into this enormous storage-battery. In another series
of caves they cooped up the water of the full tides by
means of gigantic dams and sluice-gates, and this dur-
ing ebb drove huge wheels and turbines and thus sent
the power of the moon into their treasure-house of
power. Every storm that ruffled the surface of the
ocean, every current that swept past their shores, every
ebb or flow of their tides added its quota to the energy
accumulated in their electric treasury, a far more won-
derful concentration of wealth than any Sindbad's val-
ley or Golconda. Here was ready to the hand of man
power greater than all that the nations and the gen-
erations had ever been capable of.

And the winds had been made as much the slaves
of this people as the waves; for another great cavern
that we visited was the storehouse of the energy of the
winds. In every gorge and pass and gully around

io6 Limanora

Lil aroma up almost to its crater had been erected im-
mense windmills, which as they revolved generated
electricity; this found its way from all points by mas-
sive cables buried in the earth to the conservator
of energy in this second cave. Ooriel tested the wires
to see that they were not leaking anywhere and tested
the batteries for faults, and finding everything in good
order, we passed into a third power treasury in the
rock. This was vastest of all; for into it there poured
the energy of the power-wells which was not needed
by the private houses spread over the face of the island.
As soon as the head of steam was shut off from the
machinery or the tubes of any mansion, its whole force
was turned upon an engine near the mouth of the well,
which kept generating electric force day and night.
The accumulation of energy in this cave of the wells
would have been enough to supply ten times the power
that Europe had ever used in her industries.

In order to round off our tour of inspection, Ooriel
led me to another but smaller cave which had just been
fitted up with storage-batteries. This was the cave of
the sun. For generations it had been contended that
most of the power from the sun's rays was lost, even
when they reached the earth; and the inventors had
at last worked out the problem of its utilisation. I had
noticed as I flew over the country in a faleena vast
gleaming spaces sparkling like gigantic diamonds in
the sunlight. These were the reflectors which collected
the sunbeams and concentrated their heat and light
into power. Upon the slope of lyilaronia they utilised
the miles of snow surface and gathered their gleam into
a few heat-engines that sent the generated electricity
into Rimla.

Vast as the force was which in these various ways

Rimla 107

was bent into the service of this people, there seemed
still to be the need of increasing it. Never a week
passed without some facilitation of the collection and
distribution of energy by an improvement in the ma-
chinery. The mechanic families were ever busy com-
peting with one another in invention and practical
application of some principle or idea, and the pioneering
families who rode imagination to the verge of practica-
bility marched ahead of them, mapping tracks and
highways into the unknown future. One proposal was
to utilise the magnetism of the earth as a new source of
energy, and already one of the mechanical families was
far on the way to its realisation. Another that was
near at hand was the use of the expansion of their
liquefied and solidified air for purposes of power. One
plan somewhat farther off from the realm of practica-
bility was the utilisation of the primal ether by means
of its compression and expansion. Yet they were
working at it in full hope of finding a solution of the
problem at some unexpected turn of their imaginative
road into the darkness. They had achieved so much
that they had almost boundless faith in their ultimate
power to solve all problems presented to their minds.
They would face the death of the whole race sooner
than the thought of ceasing to push forward into the
night that encircled life.

My mind was almost paralysed at the thought of the
vastness of the power controlled in this centre of force;
but it explained to me the ease with which they could
drive their leomorans miles and miles through the solid
crust of the earth, the power they had over the vol-
canic fires of Lilaroma, the strength of the blast they
could send far out to sea from their storm-cone, and
the general facility with which they could control and

io8 Limanora

use even the most titanic forces of nature. I did not
wonder now that they were the masters rather 'than the
servants of nature, especially when I saw that by the
strength and nicety of their machines they could con-
centrate all this tremendous force upon any single point
or distribute it over a wide area at the striking of a key
on the great key-board of forces. I have seen one of
the masters of energy turn the whole current from the
ten thousand services it was doing throughout the
island upon the making of a diamond; so enormous was
the temperature it generated in a few moments that a
piece of carbon, submitted to the heat and pressure,
came forth a magnificent jewel, gleaming and sheening
in the light. But this was for no silly purpose of per-
sonal ornamentation ; it was meant for the friction edge
of a leomoran down where it bit into the rock. It was
the easiest thing in the world for this people with all
the concentration of power they had at their call to
follow nature in her most occult or tremendous pro-
cesses. There was not a metal they could not produce
with their high temperatures and enormous pressures.
It is true that all other operations had to be stopped in
order to transmute rapidly common materials into gold,
irelium, or diamonds; but it could be done, and they
had no need to dig into the bowels of the earth like
other men for the more precious metals and crystals
which had accumulated there in the volcanic or chemi-
cal past.

It was one of their commonest sayings that no science
which was not creative was worthy of the name. True,
there were often long tracts of scientific investigation
that seemed entirely barren; and many of their re-
searches seemed to lead nowhither. But when I in-
quired more minutely I found that the investigators had

Rimla 109

realised many of the practical applications of the dis-
covery when once they should reach it. They re-
garded as futile all abstract inquiries which had only
a distant and unforeseen chance of ending in some-
thing useful. Even their astronomy had a keen eye
to the possibilities of their future; it led not only to a
deeper knowledge of the living heart of creation, and to
a wider enjoyment of the pleasures of imagination and
faith, but to the purposes of the immediate life; it gave
them immortal forms for their art and especially their
architecture;' it moulded or suggested their divinest
music; it brought into even their physical life influences
unlike those of the earth, and they hoped with full faith
that through this they might catch the wandering
thoughts or voices of the beings of other worlds and at
last reach the power of emigration from star to star.

Their most creative science was chemistry; for this
had reached the secrets of nature's most mysterious
processes, and had imitated and generally abbreviated
the workings of her great laboratory. The Limanorans
did not need to grow the plants and trees that used
to produce their food. Agriculture had ceased to be
necessary for them except as a part of landscape-
gardening. The elements and combinations that used
to be extracted from their harvests in order to support
and exhilarate life could be created directly in the
chemical laboratories. Everything needed as diet was
drawn straight from the earth without the long pro-
cess of growth and culination. They had the prime
factors of sustenance in unlimited quantity and purest
form with the minimum of labour, and they could give
to these the exact quality and refinement which would
bear them straight to the various tissues or cells of
the body without the need of its offensive chemical

1 10 Limanora

processes. Most of the chemistry of life-sustenance
was accomplished before the food entered the human
system, and the space and energy of the body that had
before gone to the alimentary processes of life were
now free for other and higher functions. Pharmacy
and chemical science combined to create all that the
constitution required not only for its support and fric-
tionless continuance, but for its progress towards longer
life and more ethereal texture. Their medicine had
ages before passed the crude stage of mere cure of dis-
ease. They laughed at the idea of the science as
merely therapeutic: it must be creative. The inter-
relations of the higher and lower elements of the nature
were unremittingly studied in the case of every mem-
ber of the community, and every means of change in
them that would lead to the ennobling of lyimanoran
humanity was carefully prescribed.

I was led through their food factories and grew
deeply interested in their processes of analysis and
combination. They seemed never to have any hesita-
tion about the exact quantity of each element and the
exact temperature and pressure needed to produce any
given kind of sustenance. One of the most singular
departments of these factories was that in which they
had yoked the infinitesimal plant and animal life of the
universe to the chemicalisation of their food and medi-
cine. They knew how to utilise all the life they could
come across, however microscopic, and here under their
marvellously powerful magnifying instruments I could
see the minutest of all life enslaved to their purposes.
Nothing could surpass the exactitude with which they
had defined the functions and spheres of these mys-
terious beings invisible to the naked eye. Each had
its own department of industry. No one of them inter-

Rimla 1 1 1

fered with the other. It was life put to its best pur-
pose of sustaining the noblest life. When I saw the
huge irelium tubes bearing out the results in aerial or
vaporous form, I grew anxious to test the effects at the
other end of them. At my own request I was taken
one day to Oomalefa, the great series of public halls
and baths which formed the chief centre of associative
life in the island. I had not known of the institution
before; for I was still too little advanced in physical
nature to be clear of the inner chemical processes
needed for nutrition, and it had not been thought
necessary to show me a section of their public life in
which I could have no special share. But, now that
my own eagerness for knowledge had brought me to
the stage of education which demanded insight into this
institution, they were willing that I should inspect it
and see all its peculiar features.

CHAPTER IX

OOMALEFA

THESE halls of nutrition and medication were situ-
ated on a great promontory extending miles into
the sea. It had been ledged and bastioned with lava
walls, and round the gleaming edifice ran a balcony or
rocky platform, which broke the fury of any ambitious
billows that might threaten the crystal translucence of
the walls. Here, overlooking the sea, the lyimanorans
could drink in its medicating breath; here in the vast
hall could they take that restful exercise which is the
first essential of all life; here they could commune with
their own souls or with the stars and listen to the ever-
changing rhythm of the waves as they broke into spray
or climbed to the rocky wall beneath. They considered
this chamber of the ocean and the stars as more uiedi-
cant and alimentary than any they could make with
human hands; hence it was that they had thrown out
this great projection into the sea, where they could
spend most of their hours of nutrition.

Along its highest ridge ran a series of the noblest
buildings that ever met my eye, unlike all other edifices
I had ever heard of in style of architecture and method
of grouping, but resembling in their bewildering variety
and inherent symmetry the gleaming clusters of night.

112

Oomalefa 113

Countless points of fire aimed at the heavens from
spires and towers which shone with rainbow fluctuation
in the sun. There was a milky way of jewelled pin-
nacles; and around were strewn fire-flashing constel-
lations of jewel minarets and domes. Innumerable
centres of varied roof and aspiring form led the eye by
their incompleteness to some great centre; and soon it
rested calmly on the vast yet ever-broken and chang-
ing dome that like a snow-clad mountain-ridge mas-
tered every spirit that was drawn to it. Alone this
galaxy of clustered starry forms stood out above the
sea, undwarfed by any neighbouring land and master-
ful over the billows below it. A true temple was it
even in the presence of the universe of suns that
stretched out into endless night. Within it surely
might the spirit of man feel no unholy doubts of its
immortal destiny or of its kinship with the divine.
Pure and noble orison might here be raised to the
Maker of the makers of this shrine; all trivial and
mean thoughts would here be sacrilege. When night
fell, the stars in the heavens held spirit communion
with this their brother. This was Oomalefa, or the
jewel of immortal longings.

My first visit to Oomalefa is engraved upon the
record of my past, for it was one of my first expeditions
under the guidance of Thyriel. The beauty of her
spirit dawned upon me as the day passed; afterwards
I came to see that it was everything that my own
needed, but at the time I could not reason out the
nature of my feelings. She grew upon me as the day
upon the night, and when we parted it was as if my
sun had set; helpless and stumbling, my spirit groped
for the guiding dawn again; I was forlorn, reaching
out for my other half in a lonely universe.

IH Limanora

Her presence doubtless coloured all the scenes
through which I passed, yet they were enough of
themselves to impress my mind. We alighted on the
mainland and made our way out towards the archway
which spanned the root of the promontory. The
weight of our bodies as we stood upon a certain spot
swung up the transparent portcullis, and we found
ourselves in a spacious entrance hall, its roof a moving
orrery of the sky of night, its walls lit pictures of
the ocean around framed in living sections of the sea
alive with sea-denizens, its floor a tidal beach of sand,
soft yet firm, whereon the sea ever seemed to cream
and retreat. It had all the beauty and the freshness
of the shore beneath the starred night when the tide is
making.

The next chamber we entered was as vast, and was
as many-coloured as the rainbow. It was the index
hall ; for here were marked the name and number and
situation of every chamber in Oomalefa, and under-
neath each name was shown in graphic experiment the
effect of the different medicated atmospheres upon the
various tissues of the human body. Complete repro-
ductions of the bones and muscles, the flesh and blood,
the cells and nerves and coatings were here enclosed
and the transformations pictured in the transparent
sections of the walls. An expert from the family
having the manufacture of each atmosphere under its
charge stood by and guided and explained the process.
It was a physiological laboratory, in which every
lyimanoran might see with his own eyes and hear ex-
plained by one who knew, every modification in the
tissues that a longer or shorter time spent in any
chamber would produce.

Twin with this hall was that of measurement and

Oomalefa 115

consultation. Here every entrant had all his import-
ant organs and tissues tested scientifically, and was
then told the atmospheres which would best suit the
development of any or all of his parts and faculties.
He stated the chief purpose of his existence, and con-
sulted the experts on the directions that would best
lead to it. He was told of any defect in his organic
functions and advised how it could be remedied. After
this consultation he could return to the hall of experi-
ment and see with his own eyes the effect of the various
atmospheres upon the unseen portions of his system.
Then he was permitted to enter the halls of nutrition
and medication, and choosing those which he specially
needed that day spent the time required in each. He
found exit again by the hall of measurement, and there
another testing revealed whether he had been success-
ful in his alimentary sojourn in Oomalefa, and whether
he would have to remain longer or have a certain at-
mosphere introduced into his sleeping-chamber in his
own mansion.

Every Limanoran except the young and undeveloped
had as the result of attention to health in past ages
what they called the conscience of the health. This
put them on the alert the moment any function was
disordered, and off they went to Oomalefa to consult
the medical families on the exact nature of the de-
rangement, its locality, and the diet or treatment that
would restore to complete health. Few or none of full
maturity but would feel this sanitary sense within
them like a whip or goad which would not let them
rest till the evil element was swept out. It was a daily
occurrence to meet some islander hurrying post-haste
for consultation and medication, and I came at last to
be ashamed of the lethargy which would let ine remain

n6 Limanora

inert under some decay of nerve or tissue in its primary
stages until it had resulted in ache or pain. The feel-
ing of lassitude or the absence of the sense of the full
tide of life made me rush in fear and trembling to the
hall of consultation. In my former existence I had
had the embryo of this sanitary conscience in the
pains or prostration accompanying disease, but then the
warning generally came too late. Now I was sensitive
to the slightest derangement of any tissue or part of my
system and without the goad of ache flew to Oomalefa
to find the remedy; otherwise I felt that I was doing
wrong to my future and my posterity and to the future
of the whole race. Even the actual present of the peo-
ple was affected; the slightest disorder of my constitu-
tion seemed to weigh upon the spirits of my companions
and friends, for they believed there was contagion in
every disease. As strongly did they hold that there
was a contagion of health, and would not allow any
member of their medical families or council to approach
a citizen even in consultation unless the healer was
himself whole in every atom of his constitution. To be
sound in body and spirit was as sanative of the de-
rangements of others as any active remedy.

Kvery citizen was taught enough of the medical
science of the island to know what was wrong in him-
self or his neighbour; for every citizen was a possible
father or mother; and for parenthood a thorough and
practical acquaintance with the laws of health and the
causes and cures of the commonest diseases was a first
essential. The Limanorans laughed at the absurdity
of Western civilisation in allowing men and women to
generate and bring up children with no more knowledge
of their constitution than if they were mere animals.
Still oftener they mourned that so much human gen-

Oomalefa 117

eration in the world was left to the chance dictates of
caprice, and that most medicine and education were
only blind groping in the dark. That nothing should
be done on mere authority was one of the first prin-
ciples of their civilisation.

The medical councillor knew that he had a keen
critic in every citizen; and he had to justify and make
clear every process he recommended, in order that
faith in him might remain clear. His sole advantage
was his fuller and deeper knowledge and the faculty he
had acquired from long familiarity with the questions
and problems he had to deal with. Kach member of
the medical families and council had a special section
of the human system to explore, besides having a
mastery of the whole. It was this division of labour
that caused their science of the human tissues to ad-
vance so swiftly. Not a moment of their work was lost.

I had thought at first that a people so healthy and
vigorous and devoted to such wholesome ways of life
had no need of medical science; but I soon saw that
their general sanativeness demanded a more advanced
science and art than the rude quackery of Western
medicine. All the worst diseases of maturity in
Europe, fevers, consumption, diphtheria, rheumatism,
indigestion, and the rest, were relegated in I/imanora
to childhood, and were then as mild and innocuous as
scarlatina or measles or whooping-cough; they had be-
come the enemies of unformed tissues, and found little
to batten upon even in them. Generally they were
checked in their first stage by the medical knowledge
of the parents or proparents, and it was the rarest oc-
currence to have to resort to the deeper knowledge of
the medical council, rarest of all where childhood was
concerned.

n8 Limanora

I rushed to the conclusion that the medical families
would have nothing to investigate but the development
of the tissues and organs and faculties as they existed
in Limanora; but I was disabused of this idea by the
occurrence of an epidemic in the island not long after
I arrived there. It took the form of dream-disturbed
sleep, which held the'faculties in its grasp beyond the
usual number of hours of rest. The patients tossed
and moaned and imagined horrors of the past of hu-
manity and animalhood as still occurring in their lives.
It abridged the hours of consciousness, and left the
sufferers spent and unexhilarated. It was no fever,
but only a languor that attacked the imaginative facul-
ties and made them morbid and secretive in their activi-
ties. My brain-tissues were perhaps not fine enough
to be attacked by it, and I escaped; but I was greatly
distressed to find that Thyriel had been touched by the
epidemic. My anxiety led me to know all that the
specialists discovered concerning it. It could not be
fatal, they assured me; for no epidemic had been fatal
to Limanorans for many centuries. It only meant the
loss of a valuable portion of the time of working. In
the other islands, the winged scouts brought the news,
it had swept half the populations into the grave; but
so vigorous and healthy were the various tissues of our
people that no disease could produce anything but a
temporary derangement.

By means of their skilful surgery they soon isolated
under the microscope some specimens of the living
organisms that produced the disease; they experi-
mented with all the elements and their combinations
and saw what encouraged them, what attenuated them,
and what killed them. It was not long before every
trace of the microscopic creature had vanished from

Oomalefa 119

the, island; there remained only the knowledge and the
antidote that would enable their outposts or messengers
through the sky to resist its attacks, should they ever
encounter it again. Limanorans who were sent on
missions out of the country had to be made epidemic-
proof by inoculation against known diseases before set-
ting out. But it sometimes happened, especially to
scouts into the higher regions on the outskirts of the
earth's atmosphere, that they brought back with them
symptoms that were new, and a new disease and a new
microbe had to be added to their medical lists. It was
explained to me that our solar system was travelling
every moment of its existence into new regions of
space; and as it moved it passed from time to time
through swarms of minute and attenuated life which
had been left myriads of ages before in its tracks by
some diseased member of another system. This micro-
scopic life was in its own special way immortal, and
could subsist on the scattered material life that floated
though the ether unclaimed by any planetary centre.
It was out of such waifs of life peopling space that a
new world made a new beginning in vital history; as
soon as it cooled down sufficiently, after creative col-
lision and separation, to allow of individual existence
upon it, myriads of these microscopic inhabitants of
space took possession of it, and began again the strug-
gle of life which was the universal law of infinity, and
meant the ascension of all energy through higher and
higher circles.

Disease was but a form of this eternal struggle for
existence; it was the attempt of invisible lower forms
to master the higher human tissues and make them
their feeding-ground. The original enemies of man,
the wild beasts, were subdued or tamed or driven forth

i2o Limanora

into the deserts as soon as savage life was passed.
Then began the fiercer contest for the possession of his
own cells and tissues and organs. Enemies that he
could not see migrated out of the surrounding elements
into his system as soon as it became delicate enough to
stir their appetite, and for ages there were no weapons
against them; chance now and again offered one; but
generally he groped about in his frantic ignorance for
anything that would ease the pain from these gnawing
foes within him. Out of this rose by slow steps a kind
of quackery they called the science of medicine; but
the conflict still remained unequal; the invisible ene-
mies had the best of it, and they were ever being re-
cruited by new enemies out of space, which bred new
and more appalling plagues. Not till it was found that
the newer these settlers were the more virulent were
their ravages was there any chance of a real science
of medicine arising from this everlasting agonism.

The first beginnings of a true science appeared in the
attempts to deplete the soil by setting tamed and ex-
hausted specimens of their foes to feed on it. A soil
once reft of the elements that invited and fitted any
disease germs seldom suffered in any serious degree
from them again. Soon by their new electro-micro-
scopes or clirolans they were able to classify the in-
finitely minute foods of these infinitely minute pasturers
on the human tissue. Their microscopes, enormously
though they had added to the power of human vision
into the atomic world, had been unable to advance be-
yond the discovery and complete classification of the
invisible organisms. Their clirolans combined pho-
tography with electro-microscopy in such a way that
every change in the systems of their minute foes was
recorded; they were able to see the elements taken from

Oomalefa 121

the human system absorbed and sifted of their nutri-
tive powers, and the debris or manure ejected and left
to poison the human tissues; it was not the presence of
the organisms themselves, or even their destruction of
essential elements that generally produced the disease,
but the accumulation of the exhausted excreta, clog-
ging the various functions. At first medical science
satisfied itself with cultivating feeble and underbred
germs, and turning them loose on the human body in
order to make them exhaust the elements which at-
tracted their kin. Next they discovered the chemical
combination that, introduced into the body, would neu-
tralise the poisonous qualities of the bacterial debris.
Last of all by their vimolans or photo electric analysers
they found the exact food which attracted each form of
microbe to the tissue and nourished them there; and
they experimented electro-chemically till they knew
the element that, combining with this bacterial food,
would neutralise its attraction and yet leave the body
as efficient and healthy as before; in short, they could
prescribe the antidote to every disease that had ever
enfeebled any portion of their system. Diseases were
nothing else than the infinitesimal life of space fixing
itself, after an eternity of detachment and attenuation,
upon a living soil fat with the elements of attraction
and nourishment and yet too feeble to hold out against
its ravages. They drew an analogy from their old
agriculture; weeds were nothing but plants finding at
last the conditions which would give them the victory
in the struggle for existence and would enable them to
grow so rapidly and luxuriantly as to choke all neigh-
bours; and their old science of earth culture set them
on the way to a true medical science. They had
watched with their clirolans the selective processes of

i22 Limanora

the roots of each weed, and by various analysers had
found the combination of elements in the soil and air
by which it overcame its rivals; they then discovered
the special component which, uniting with its food,
would deprive the weed of its nutritive powers. Thus
were they able to encourage or discourage on any soil
any growth they might select. But agriculture had
been completely superseded by their later chemistry.
The best thing it had left to their civilisation was the
cue it gave by analogy to their true science of thera-
peutics.

How minute and detailed was their study of the in-
finitesimal life of the universe, I could not have
imagined without having seen it in practice. They
had advanced so far with their clirolans and vimolans
that they were now discovering a still more infinitesi-
mal world which was parasitic on microscopic life.
There had been elements and effects at times discover-
able in their therapeutic problems that disturbed the
certainty of their conclusions and solutions. Again
and again their foresights had been mistaken, their
calculations thrown out. Most often was this the case
on the border-land of the moral world. They had
known in their own far past history, and in the more
recent history of the other islands of the archipelago,
the demoralising effect of epidemics and plagues, especi-
ally of a new and vigorous type. For a time the people
who came within the influence of the disease seemed to
return almost to savagery. And yet every plague
differed slightly from every other in its moral results.
One made the whole population thieves; another made
them liars; a third stirred up a fury of lust; a fourth
delivered over the soul to despair of life, and a fifth to
disloyalty and intrigue. When once their attention

Oomalefa 123

was called to this widespread demoralisation after an
epidemic, they began to watch the effect of individual
illnesses on the mind; and in every case there were re-
sults, emotional, moral, or intellectual, that were not to
be accounted for by mere weakness of the body or irri-
tation of the nerves, or by the poisonous debris that
the minute organisms threw off.

They invented still more powerful clirolans, which
revealed an intensity of life they had not imagined.
The disease germs brought into the human system still
more minute parasites that at once attacked the brain
and the nerve-centres. In one disease these invisible
vermin preferred one set of brain-cells, in another they
preferred another. The therapeutic families engaged
in the investigations were only just coming to classify
these moral and intellectutl parasites of the disease
germs. Nor had they yet been able to discover any
cure for these but the sympathetic proximity of strong
and noble minds. The look from the eyes of some of
their greatest doctors, even the touch of their hands,
seemed to drive the living evil forth, or at least to at-
tenuate and enfeeble it. The mind of the patient rose
triumphant in the presence of one of these wise and
healing personalities. It had been for ages the tradi-
tional maxim of polity that only the loftiest and most
advanced, as well as most sympathetic natures should
be allowed to specialise for the medical castes, or marry
into the medical families. None were allowed to nurse
the sick but the beautiful souls of the community;
their mere presence seemed to strengthen the fainting
heart in the struggle for life. As the mind grew strong,
the ravages of the disease lessened. For now with
their more powerful clirolans they found that, as the
brain or nerve-centres acquired strength, the parasitic,

1 24 Limanora

invisible life took its way back to its original hosts and
preyed on them. It was indeed one of the maxims of
their community to keep the system of every individual
at its highest point of vitality. A loss of exhilaration
in any citizen was marked at once by his neighbours,
just like a lapse into criminality in Western civilisation.
It was the symptom of possible disease with all its
power of contagion. The sense of active vitalisation
(what we call the spirits) was the barometer of the
sanitary, moral, and intellectual atmosphere, and
every L,imanoran was keenly sensitive to all its
changes.

In Oomalefa it was impossible to conceal the source
of the degeneration. The specialised families of the
medical council knew where to apply their investiga-
tory instruments. Kven With their own eyes and ears
and electric sense they could often detect the exact
nesting-place of the intrusive microbes; for though to
my muddy senses their bodies were as opaque as my
own, except for a certain pellucid light which illumi-
nated the skin and made the complexion so beautiful,
the processes of life seemed an open book to their acute
observation. Their hearing could detect any change
in the normal beat of the heart and even the passage of
the blood in the veins, which, Thyriel has told me,
sounded like the liquid rhythm of mountain-rills.
Their eyes could see through the skin the delicate
veinings underneath and detect every nervous or mus-
cular effort. Their magnetic sense could tell them
whether thought or emotion was developing in the
centres or passing along the nerves. The very casing
of the brain seemed to them to be semi-transparent, and
they were conscious, though dimly, of the movements
of even the finer tissues, non-existent to my senses ex-

Oomalefa 125

cept under the microscope. Hence it was that each
Limanoran had an isolated dwelling-place for himself.
It would have been impossible for him to find rest
or sleep close to the living and unresting functions
of another human system; and it was only the
rhythm of the movements and sounds of all the organs
and processes which made proximity to one another
tolerable. I have often seen Thyriel in raptures
over the noble harmony of a healthy and virtuous
personality; to her ear the 'pulsations and other
sounds were like a majestic piece of music; to her
eye the rush and hurry of the vital processes were
not unlike the motions of the starry system of night;
whilst the exhilaration through the electric sense
from the speeding thoughts and emotions of a sound
mind in a sound body was at times ecstatic. The
nobler the soul that she was conscious of in her
neighbour, the keener was her enjoyment of proximity.
It was this that made only the purest and greatest
minds in the healthiest bodies admissible to the medical
families or council. There was a curative power in
their very presence.

With their clirolans and vimolans and other aids to
the senses the medical sages could detect the slightest
jar in the rhythm of the system and locate it with the
greatest ease. Having located it, they knew the para-
site that had begun to multiply and clog the organ or
tissue or function, and the treatment that it required.
Every moral fault had its corresponding disease and
infinitesimal parasite they held; and so rapidly could
the minute organisms increase and so impalpably and
easily could they migrate from human being to human
being that the contagion of vice was a thousand times
more appalling in its ravages than that of mere physi-

i26 Limanora

cal disease. There was great trepidation when any
ailment attacked the body of a Limanoran, and he was
heartily ashamed of its appearance and alarmed lest it
should spread, or lead to its natural consequence, moral
degeneracy; but, if the parasitic attack was found to be
on one of the higher centres of life, the alarm was great
and wide, for it was far more subtle in its insidiousness
and omnipotence. The patient was at once quaran-
tined and only the noblest of medical sages could break
his isolation. All the powers of his mind and of the
minds of his nurses and medical attendants were con-
centrated on the offending tissue, and strong thermo-
electric aids were applied to it, so that it should soon
regain its old vitality and drive the intruders out. In
the chamber was kept up an atmosphere of the special
elements which would nourish the degenerate cells and
also of those that would destroy the microbes ; only as
a last resort was surgery used and the part laid open to
the local application of re- agents against the hostile
organisms. The ruder and older forms of evil — passion,
envy, malice, hatred, jealousy, contempt, vanity —
rarely appeared in grown men and women at that ad-
vanced stage of their civilisation. They had become
diseases of the immature periods of life, when the soul
was passing through the primitive phases of the devel-
opment of mankind. They were the ailments of child-
hood and youth ; and hundreds of the lyimanorans now
grew up without once experiencing any one of them.
When they did appear, isolation was the first step ; and
the parents or proparents could generally cope with the
moral disease without having recourse to a medical
family or to Oomalefa. Every traditional method of
cure was applied most vigorously, for they shrank from
the thought of leaving any seed of the contagion in

Oomalefa 127

the system to germinate at some later and more danger-
ous period of life.

When the home circle was unable to detect the exact
character of the disturbing influence, the young patient
was brought under the gaze and the tests of the medi-
cal families. If their clirolans and vimolans failed to
identify the parasitic evil, they tried their magnetome-
ters, which were so delicate as to indicate the first be-
ginnings of mental or moral disorder. By means of
another magnetic instrument they were able to ex-
tract portions of the microbic debris, and then with
their photo-electric analysers or vimolans they sepa-
rated its various elements and saw what moral evils
had entered into the system. They had the physical
equivalents and results of every form of guilt and
crime, and thus in its very inception a moral taint
could be detected and cured before it had time to ap-
pear in the words or conduct of the patient. Most
often this taint was due to some ancestral weakness of
tissue inviting the swarms of parasitic microbes through
which the earth is for ever passing. On the first signs
of lowering vitality the pedigree of the patient was
consulted for the record of the retrogressive tendencies
of his forefathers, and not till the possibilities of atavism
were exhausted were the other tests resorted to.

It was on the basis of these two coincident causes,
degeneration of tissue and microbic life in the atmo-
sphere, that they were able to explain the strange
contemporaneity of revolutions, panics, wars, religious
revivals, and widespread outbreaks of crime or im-
morality in various parts of the earth. The planetary
system as it sweeps through space cannot help passing
through vast oceans of living microscopic matter which
have drifted from other universes geological ages before

128 Limanora

in their unresting migration from infinity to infinity,
and which lead a feeble death-in-life till they meet with
fit atmospheres, such as will make them strong and
teeming. For new-born worlds, just ready for the
settlement of life upon them, this is a blessing; but
for those having upon them highly developed organised
life it is too often a curse. Kvery nation or tribe where
civilisation has become enfeebled by luxury or immoral
systems of polity or domestic manners becomes the
prey of the new swarm, which multiplies and spreads
itself on a fat and unexhausted soil with the swiftness of
a long unsated appetite. The people rise in epidemic
fury, and every institution suffers from the madness.
In different ages the frenzy takes different forms, but
there is a striking simultaneity in these outbreaks all
over history; and only this intrusion of cosmic infinites-
imal life on the weakened higher centres of the human
system can explain it fully. None but the peoples who
have ordered their existence on the moral laws of the
universe and thus kept the tissues strong, solid, and
unyielding can resist the plague-like mania. The result
of these epidemics was in the end, they held, a benefit
to humanity; for they swept away most of the tainted
life from the earth and left the healthier constitutions
able for another advance in intellectual power or in
morality. The Ivimanoran medicists were ever testing
and analysing the atmosphere of the earth for these in-
trusive emigrants from other worlds; vigorous and
healthy though their systems were, some chance minute
stranger might find a lodgment in them, and cause
much derangement before he could be got rid of.
Ethics, psychology, history, and ethnology were as
important to their medical investigations as physiology,
anatomy, and chemistry.

Oomalefa 129

With all this extension of medicine into regions that
seemed to me, a man of Western civilisation, the most
remote from it, there had been a gradual contraction
of the sphere of surgery. The hacking and hewing of
the human frame to get rid of some intrusive organism
seemed to them as barbarous as the butchering of ani-
mals for food. Brilliant operations they thought the
confession of failure in previsional and preventive medi-
cine. They would have considered it a disaster, if not
a crime, to let any disease proceed so far unobserved as
to need the excision of the part affected. Even when,
by an accident, a bone was fractured, they could light
up the whole sphere of the accident and see exactly
how to get the sections or fragments to meet again.
Then, keeping the limb or organ at rest, they concen-
trated all the energy of the patient's body and mind
and the curative influence of their own presence upon
it. They sent the nutritive powers of circulation and
nerve-energy into it by application of their various
electric instruments, some of which combined the effect
of exercise and the effect of heat. In a few days,
sometimes in a few hours, the junction was complete,
and only rest and a medicated and nutritive atmo-
sphere were needed to make the tissue as sound as
before.

One of their newest instruments and the most
effective for the avoidance of surgical operations was
the alclirolan, a combination of microscope, camera in
vacuo, and electric power. It could by means of a
swiftly moving film, on which fell electric light through
a vacuum, take a picture of the life- processes within
the living body, however minute. Then by means of
magnifiers and brilliant light they could throw from
this film a moving picture on a screen, so enormously

130 Limanora

enlarging the process of any part of the body that even
a novice could see at a glance what was healthy and
what was diseased or obstructed. It was this alclirolan
that made the study of physiology in the living body
simple enough for the very youngest. It was by this
that they were able to supplement the experimental
hall at the entrance to Oomalefa, and to show in pro-
cess the effect in actual human bodies of disease,
microbes, and remedies. Every minute process of the
various organs and tissues of the body and of the brain
was reproduced marvellously magnified on the walls.
There was no new medicine but was tested and had its
effects on the various parts of the body revealed by this
new method. There was no new disease or microbe
but gave up its secrets to this instrument.

The only surgery they had was creative, like all their
other sciences and arts. It had to do chiefly with the
capacity of the skull. The appearance of epilepsy in
some of their ablest men and families ages before had
pointed the way. Their knowledge of the localities
and tissues of the brain, along with the semi -trans-
parency of their skulls and the advantages their alcli-
rolan had introduced, gave them complete command of
everything that was proceeding within the head. They
could by their electric apparatus light up the tissues
and see what part was growing and pressing upon the
containing bone. They therefore learned to trephine
the epileptic sufferers and thus relieve the oppressed
locality of the brain. From this practice and the grow-
ing knowledge of the great purpose of life they passed
into the stage of creative surgery. For imperfect tissue
perfect was substituted. Man-grafting had become the
most important branch of surgery. They could modify
and even create new faculty or organ or tissue by graft-

Oomalefa 131

ing what they had made on to the part of the infantile
system which needed it. A child to be devoted to a
special pursuit which needed some faculty exceptionally
developed had his skull enlarged in its early and plastic
stage over the portion of the brain that was the material
equivalent and instrument of the faculty; and when
most of the energies of life began to pour into his pur-
suit the tissue had room to grow. If a combination of
exceptional faculties were needed in any profession or
pursuit, protuberances in various parts under the hair
or even on the brow could be perceived on looking
closely. So nice had this creative art become that the
most delicate and minute trephining could be accom-
plished without the patient knowing much about it;
the operation was generally finished and the wound
healed whilst he slept. Their bodies had great re-
cuperative powers, and the means applied were
wonderful in their rapidity of working. The hand of
the operator, too, manipulated the part under a huge
microscope that magnified the tissues ten thousand-fold.
In fact they had all kinds of modifications of the micro-
scope that would fit even internal investigations; one
reflected the part in the manner of the reflecting tele-
scope, and turned microscopes of great power on the
reflected image. They had surgical modifications of
their clirolans and vimolans so that they could examine
permanent moving pictures or analyses of the tissues
to be investigated. Nothing could escape their methods
of finding out defects in the human system. However
deep the organ or tissue to be examined might be in
the body, it flashed out its forms and processes upon
their irelium sheets as they moved. By moving these
photographic records rapidly underneath their micro-
scopes the physiological processes of life could be

132

Limanora

reproduced and examined; stationary, each moment of
the processes could be slowly investigated. Their
photo-electric instruments could light up and make
transparent any stratum of tissue desired, whilst keep-
ing the rest in shadow or dark outline.

CHAPTER X

THE FIRI,A, OR ELECTRIC SKNSE

THEIR physiology had no longer any need of
anatomy or vivisection as its foundation and
starting-point. Besides the alclirolans, they had their
mirlans or life-lamps, as they called them; and these
enabled them to watch any process of the human body
and see how it changed under the treatment they ap-
plied. These life-lamps appealed not only to their
eyes and ears, but to their electric sense. They iso-
lated the magnetic force as well as the sounds and ap-
pearance of any section of tissue, and took graphic and
permanent record of it, as they did of the changes in
form or texture or sound. Every kind of tissue in any
organ or limb had its normal magnetic equivalent
measured in terms of the personal equation offeree and
beat of the heart. The slightest deviation from this at
any time of the day or month would at once challenge
attention and lead to microscopic investigation. They
enlarged the electrograph, the phonograph, and the
photograph of the point indicated and were thus able
to examine under the sarifolan every infinitesimal atom
of it in all the aspects which appealed to their sight,
hearing, and electric sense. Their sarifolan magnified
and interpreted for these investigative senses the

133

134 Limanora

graphic record of their mirlans, as the microscope mag-
nifies for the sight. I could see and hear the move-
ments and processes in the tissue, but the electric
effect was to me as general as a shock from a galvanic
battery; I could not detect anything definite or measur-
able. But the Limanorans, though they had something
of our diffusion of electric sense, had also in the back
of their necks a localised sense that responded to the
faintest magnetic influence and measured roughly its
amount and its changes in kind and degree. The
delicate nerve-centre there, which might have been the
remains of a backward-looking eye, had developed with
them into a most sensitive collector of electric vibration
in the air or in any section of matter; and in every
atom, whether organic or inorganic, they declared
there was ever some electric wave motion; in some it
was too faint to affect their firla or electric sense, but
then their delicate instruments for magnifying it, like
their mirlans, made it manifest to their senses and de-
finable. It was to my general feeling of magnetism
what the muscular sense in my fingers was to my
diffused sense of touch. It had taken many generations
to develop, and in their children it never appeared till
they had reached the close of youth; but part of their
education was directed towards making it more sensi-
tive and useful as a power for measuring force. A
former generation of their medical investigators had
long noticed and studied the effect of the concentration
of will-power through the eye upon the back of the
neck of one who sat in front of them; although the
patient could tell nothing by means of his five senses
of such an effort being made behind him, he generally
turned round. Experiment after experiment proved
that there was a force communicated through the inter-

The Firla, or Electric Sense 135

vening space to some sensitive spot on the back of the
head or neck, and they knew that relics existed of what
seemed once to have been an eye in that region. They
came to the conclusion that this must have a closer
connection with the higher brain-centres than any part
of the body except the eye, and bent their whole atten-
tion upon its nature. They soon defined it as a local-
ised electric sense and by practice made it as keen at
least as the sense of touch in the ringers. They were
at last able to define the direction of an electric in-
fluence and to note its changes of force, and, after
several generations, their firla, as they called it, came
to rank next to sight and equal to hearing in the
analysis and investigation of the phenomena of the
universe.

Corresponding to this electro- receptive sense, they
had also cultivated the magnetic force of the eye.
They had long known and investigated the exact re-
lationship of light and electricity, and they could at
any moment and place transform the one into the
other. They had also observed ages before that
even the commonest and weakest human eye had
a faint luminosity in absolute darkness, and that
any exertion of the will or passing wave of passion
greatly increased it. Beside this fact they put the
open secret that men of strong will and character
differed from their fellows in the power of the eye, not
only over human beings but over animals, and also
the fact that the long-known plaything, mesmerism,
had the eye as its chief organ. They came to the
conclusion that the will was on its physical side a
magnetic force, and that though most of its play was
through the sense of touch, the muscular energies, and
the voice, the eye was its highest and best channel.

136 Limanora

This inference was strengthened by noticing that
amongst animals the fiercest-willed and most predatory
could paralyse their victims by the exercise of some
optic power, and as they prowled through the night,
they had a perceptible glitter in their eyes that shone
in the dark like lamps. They applied themselves to
a minute and systematic investigation of the subject,
and soon had instruments which would respond to the
faintest ocular exercise of the will. They could
measure any increase in the magnetic power of the
eye; and before long it was observed that the subjects
they experimented on grew rapidly in optic magnetism
as they practised, and came to have a perceptible sheen
in their eyes when they stood in the darkness. These
men and women were found to have rapidly increasing
power of sending anyone to sleep by gazing at him.
At last all doubt vanished as to the new latent faculty
which lay in the eye.

They set themselves vigorously to turn this new
knowledge into art, and trained themselves, and still
more their children, in eye-power till it became an in-
stinctive habit to use it. After a time they came
to see that the power was not one but manifold; the
sleep-inducing effect was only an elementary applica-
tion of it. A further development was a soothing in-
fluence upon the nerves that never went as far as sleep.
Then the medicative powers of the eye were raised in
the families of medicists into capacities which seemed
to me almost preternatural. A more widely diffused
specialisation of the new function was eye-language.
Long-continued emotional dialogues would proceed in
companies where I could not hear a sound, and at the
end Thyriel would tell me the intricacies of the inter-
play of thought and emotion. It is true they could

The Firla, or Electric Sense 137

not easily communicate any unspiritual fact, needing
some concrete image, unless they employed the code of
eye-signals which every L,imanoran learned ; this com-
bined the motions of either eye and magnetic impulses
of various kinds and degrees, and contained several
thousand words and phrases. I had so much to learn
in the island that I had not time to master more than
a few of the simpler combinations, so that I was often
bewildered in their silent assemblies. But for a long
time what seemed to me most marvellous was that
intimate and facile converse went on when the two
friends were at considerable distances from each other;
when occupied in this they kept alternately turning the
back and the face. This was due to the receptive mag-
netic faculty being in the back of the neck and the
active one being in the eye. The eye was receptive in
only a secondary degree, so that when the magnetic
impulse was weakened by distance, the eye could not
interpret it, and the back had to be turned in order to
catch its full force. To see two men or women standing
a mile or two apart and wheeling back and front every
minute, and that, too, in alternating harmony as if they
had been two sympathetic toys, at first would have
made me laugh but for my wonder; and when the in-
tercourse was rapid they looked like two whirling
dervishes; but I grew accustomed to the sight, and
soon began .to feel with the people themselves that it
was a most dignified feature of their life. For a time
it seemed almost beyond nature that they could com-
municate even emotions and impulses at such a dis-
tance; for it was only emotions and impulses, and not
facts, that passed, as the motions of the eye were
not apparent except within comparatively short spaces.
Yet there were electro-magnifiers which, affixed to

138 Limanora

their firla on the back of the neck, enabled them to
feel the faintest impulse from a distance and interpret
it, and a modification of the vimolan, used like spec-
tacles, reduced the sense-numbing power of distance a
thousand-fold ; they could see by means of these electro-
optical instruments the minutest movement many miles
off.

The most striking manifestation of their active elec-
tric faculty was to be seen only in a few Limanorans,
who would have been in the primitive ages leaders of
masses either as orators or as warriors. These had
such power of eye that they could bend others to their
purpose without the utterance of a word. It was not
greater genius or nobility of thought or strength of
character that made them so much more influential
than their fellows, but sheer magnetic force of will.
With evil motives or depraved minds, they would have
been dangerous to the whole community: as mere war
leaders or beasts of prey they would have been exiled;
but with beneficent purpose and a deep-ingrained sense
of the ultimate aim of their whole civilisation, they
were of great power on the side of progress. They
were the- organisers of the community, the captains of
industry. They managed and directed the various
services in which all the citizens had to take part so
that there should be no superfluous issue of commands,
no friction, or even consciousness of direction. They
were in complete sympathy with all the people, binding
them into a unity of discipline; and their magnetism of
will, applied through the eye, served but to stir the
love of service and duty to enthusiasm. In an age of
semi-savagery, or of revised savagery such as the
military ages of Europe were, some of them would
have been great conquerors, combining many peoples

The Firla, or Electric Sense 139

and vast territories for a few years in order to sate
their ambition or love of glory. As it was, the equal
development of their other powers and the universal
dominance of the moral aim of the race made their
wills innocuous.

It was the same with the other manifestations of
human magnetism, which in defective or half- developed
civilisations played so maleficent a part. That power
of voice and speech which could sway mobs to evil in
such communities was in Limanora the endowment of
every citizen. The electric tone quivered and rang in
every voice I heard; it was like the sweetest music,
drawing the soul to it. The fascination of person-
ality, which so often in Western women, even where
they have no beauty or grace, proves the ruin of
dozens of men, belonged to both sexes in Limanora
and to every citizen. It was a powerful, diffused
magnetism ever attracting its opposite without reveal-
ing its secret even to its possessor. There was to me
something very winsome iti most of them, even when
saying and doing nothing; and in Thyriel, although
my intellect told me she was not what Europeans call
beautiful, this became ravishing. Her personal mag-
netism was overpowering, even when she was silent and
stood at a distance, and in rude times of ignorance
would have been set down to witchcraft.

All these investigations and results I learned as
clearly as if I saw them with the eye, in the firlamai or
division of the electric sense, one of the vast halls of
Oomalefa. Here were all the instruments needed to
develop the firla or aid it, and all those by which
it sought deeper into the secrets of nature. Off the
hall ran corridors and arcades, which were to the firla
what picture and sculpture galleries are to the ocular

140 Limanora

imagination, supplying it with noble and pleasurable
excitation, as the music domes touched the aural
imagination. They had their passive firlamaic arts
of beauty as well as their active. In one vast arcade
they could sit and feel with their firlas the electric
harmonies of any given tract of air or earth or ocean,
the harmonies that play as it were on the surface; this
was equivalent to gazing at landscapes, real or pic-
tured, with the eye. In another there was firlamaic
sculpture; in this were gathered the noblest achieve-
ments of their electric artists, who strove to concentrate
into some definite form varied magnetic materials so
as to stir the imagination through the firla to thoughts
of the titanic harmonies of the universe. They gave this
form beauty for the eye as well ; but that was not the
primary aim; the gazers, as they sat, preferred to turn
their backs to the work; for then through the firla
their imagination was thrown into an attitude of placid
meditation which seemed to have before it some great
spheral harmony of the stars. In a third series of lofty
corridors there was continually proceeding what might
be called firlamaic music. In two or three it was
entirely instrumental. Great firlamans or electric
organs, at each end of one corridor I entered, flashed
out what was to me the most appalling medley of
lightnings; the gleams crossed and interwove and
changed mass and form as if it were a dance of meteors,
now slow and stately like a minuet, again swift and
brilliant and dazzling as if the stars of heaven had
joined the lightnings in a bewildering yet harmonious
ballet. At first I was stunned and blinded; but soon
I felt dimly the ecstasy apparent in my neighbours.
Their eyes gleamed with joy; to me some of them
seemed almost in a delirium; they were unconscious

The Firla, or Electric Sense

of their immediate surroundings, for I spoke to Thyriel
and received no answer, and her motion through the
hall as we started to leave it was somnambulous. She
told me afterwards that, though her firla was only in
its infancy, she felt drawn up into the heavens as in a
trance; she seemed to feel the worlds move around her
and attract her into their spheral chant; her imagina-
tion dealt with interastral forces as with playmates
from eternity ; she leapt vast ages every moment, and
spanned in a stride spaces which seemed to her com-
mon powers infinite. She would not rest till she could
enjoy this macrocosmic orchestra to the full as her
parents did; she would not let a day pass without such
practice as would develop her firla to the utmost. I
felt solitary and forlorn as I heard her ecstatic descrip-
tions and resolves, and thought upon my incapacity to
understand them. In a moment she knew my dejec-
tion, and realised how forgetful she had been of me and
of her surroundings. She at once threw off her imagi-
native trance of magnetic enjoyment, and determined
to keep pace with my advance. It was a slow and
weary path I had to travel ; but her cheerful encourage-
ment prevented despair. Through the years between
I was able by dint of constant and vigorous practice to
concentrate into my eyes and into the back of my head
much of the magnetic power and receptiveness that had
existed before in my body, but in a diffused condition.
I was at last able to go with her and appreciate the
stellar imaginings which the flashing firlamans excited.
There was another majestic arcade, in which Lima-
noran artists themselves joined in sublime firlamaic
music. On my first visit to it, many years after my
introduction to Oomalefa, I was appalled to see human
beings stand like Joves flashing long tongues of light-

i42 Limanora

ning or flame from their eyes or fingers; they seemed
to stand unscathed in a fiery furnace, or rather to
weave and plait and mould the flames as if they had
been threads of some plastic material. Had I come
here during my early novitiate in the island, I should
have fled in terror as from dreams of hell realised.
There in the midst passed the artist like a dark shuttle
through a loom of lightnings as he wove them into an
ever-changing web of living colour. For a time I
could not control my terror, as I looked to see him
shrivelled to ashes. At last through my reason I man-
aged to calm myself into feeling that he was the master
and creator of this display and that the dreadful tongues
of flame and swift meteors which rose and vanished
around him were unstinged and innocuous. Then
began to creep into me a sweet sense of some magnetic
harmony, stirring my mind to contemplation of the
mighty forces of the world. I seemed to know the
voiceless majesty of time, as if vast ages were crushed
into moments; I followed our orb as it swept away from
the immense concentric circles of flame wheeling round
the core of whirling fire; I saw it mass into an eye of
passion fixed in gaze upon the mother star it had left;
alone it travelled into space tied like an infant still by
magnetic threads to the parent sun; out into the in-
finite it yearned to rush seeking life and souls to nestle
in its bosom ; yet never would the unseen mother cord
give way. Out and out flamed the earth into immeas-
urable space and the wild longing was calmed; the
tempests of fire lulled and fell; the luminous billows
ceased to rear their crests or toss their fiery spindrift;
a dull, still-glimmering crust imprisoned her torrid
heart; the conflagrations burst forth in wider and
wider intervals. At last she wooed the germs of life

The Firla, or Electric Sense 143

from the wandering infinities to rest for brief spaces on
her bosom. Night brought peace to her, and the stars
with their cool and unimpassioned rays bred within
her through the ages gentle thoughts and a love of
teeming life; they quenched her superficial fires, and,
binding chains of magnetic power around her, drew her
out into spaces of infinity beyond the scorching flame
tongues of her fervid mother. Life born and nursed in
the cold interstellar tracts teemed on her breast. Back
she sprang again into the warmer rays of the mother
orb, breaking the stellar bonds, and life leapt from sea
to air and crawled upon the new-won lands in mon-
strous forms. I/ast came the strangest monster of all,
erect like a bird, yet wingless, first swinging from tree
to tree, then skimming the plains upon the backs of
fellow-beasts he had mastered: man, the portent of
God, had come. Slowly he grew and slowly sloughed
off his beast habits Prehistoric time focussed into a
moment. First came tyranny and war as moulders of
his spirit; then they became monsters, barring his way
to the divine. Great monarchies and empires flew by
like a lightning flash; thousands of years with their
events or somnolences passed swift as a dream.
Stronger grew reason in man's brain, the love in his
heart; divine influences surrounded him, watching the
dawn of the new power of thought and nursing the
growth of the spirit in him. Then out of the darkness
came the historic ages of this island's progress towards
diviner light, and rushed in a flash across my brain.

Then I awoke from this ennobling dream, swift and
beautiful as a trance made up of moments, each of which
contained an eternity. The electric song of the history
of our world had ceased, and my spirit fell like a meteor
from heaven, out of the exhilaration and the ecstasy.

144 Limanora

Never before had I felt as if my life was that of a god
watching from above the flight of time. I scarcely
knew that the darkness around me had suddenly
turned into daylight and the web of lightning flashes
had vanished ; I was led from the arcade by Thyriel as
in a dream. When we reached the gallery which over-
looked the ocean and I turned my eyes to the dome of
heaven, I was conscious that a new glory had come into
my life. Dim though my conception of the electric
song of creation had been, I realised with joy what a
vast universe had been added to the possibilities of
my life by the discovery of this new sense and of the
sublime things I might perceive through it. I would
not be behind Thyriel in the cultivation of the magnet-
ism in my system, but would enter with redoubled
ardour on the practice of my firla.

It was thus too I came to understand the passion
they had for Firlalain, as this section of Oomalefa was
called. The young were not allowed to enter it, lest it
should act as a narcotic on their sense of duty to the
ultimate aim of their civilisation. Not till they had
gained full mastery of themselves, and especially of
their appetites and passions, were they admitted, and
even then it was with a caution which showed the
greatness of the risk they incurred. The delights of
the new sense were apt to grow intoxicating, and there
had been at one time a fear of some becoming magnetic
drunkards, who would spend their days in Firlalain
besotted with indolent enjoyment of the exhilarating
flight through the realms of fancy, and heedless of the
health and interests of their other tissues. Once they
had reached maturity, there was no such fear; and no
curb was then set upon their liberty to enter these halls
of electric harmony.

The Firla, or Electric Sense 145

After they had come to that stage of life when the
walls of their blood-vessels began to lose flexibility, it
became almost a duty to frequent Firlalain. The
stimulus given to the currents of life by the mere phy-
sical influence of the electricity was enough to overcome
the growing rigidity of cell and tissue; but the rush
of thought and fancy gave the whole nature such im-
petus that the torrent of the blood through its chan-
nels induced the plasticity of youth again. They had
other methods of postponing the approach of old age;
they could withdraw from the walls of the various
vessels of the body the accumulation of lime and other
hardening elements; there were several chambers of
diet the atmosphere of which neutralised the increase
of salts and carbons in the body, and other medicinal
chambers which could bring off by the pores any dele-
terious or obstructive matters forming in any of the
tissues; but Firlalain was the most effective postponer
of that stage of life when yearnings come into the heart
for final and complete rest, for it flooded the whole
being with new impulse and new energy. Most of all
was the great stellar arcade frequented by the old in
order to drive off the ennui of existence; a feeling
which indicated the gradual calcarescence or indura-
tion of the brain and heart-tissues. Here any region
of the starry night they chose could be made to con-
centrate its magnetic influence upon their firla. A
man might take a new tract and new blending of im-
aginative impulse every day of life for centuries and
yet not exhaust the limit of variety; for the stars
moved through infinite space as the earth moved, but
in different directions, and ever new universes or worlds
were coming within the range of the Limanoran electric

sense.

10

146 Limanora

I shall not easily forget my first experience of this
astral gallery. Along it at intervals were placed great
electroscopes and magnetic magnifiers, that gathered in
electric influences from various portions of the heavens.
Almost every seat was occupied by one of the older in-
habitants of the island, and as they sat with the focus
of the huge instrument resting on their neck their faces
seemed almost to have a halo round them, so brightly
did they beam with ecstasy. Their eyes were closed,
and I would have said that each was dreaming some
dream of glory which inundated his being, had I not
seen their eyes open for a moment as we passed, in con-
sciousness of the world around; the vision came to
their waking imagination. Then I looked up through
the great magnifying domes and saw the stars and con-
stellations mass upon the face of heaven, and huge
spheres concentrating upon themselves the sheen of
some starry circle.

Thyriel led me to one vacant seat, and before I
turned my back to the magnetic lens, I gazed upwards
and saw the Southern Cross pouring down its silver
arrows. I had not sat there long before a thrill came
upon me which spread throughout my system; my
pulse fluttered like a bird in contending storms; every
nerve began to throb with expectation and delight; I
could have created worlds in my ardour ; sublime
thoughts swam in from eternity upon my soul ; I had
the mother passion within me which would have
moulded nobler spirits than my own. At last I felt
the currents of my existence centre upon one realm of
space and was conscious of countless life around me
which struggled and mounted upwards. I felt my
nature drawn to higher levels than any terrene exist-
ence I had ever known. I seemed to breathe with

The Firla, or Electric Sense 147

difficulty the diviner airs of greater purpose, and yet
there were strains of discord from lower types of being
revealing gradations in the new universe. Some orbs
were already on the path of decay ; and on them the
higher life was succumbing to the weakened vitality.
Others had just attained to life; and on them had
settled migrants from other spheres, whose elevating
powers they had exhausted. Some were flitting like
ghosts about their mother suns with but a thin ethereal
life now darting between atmosphere and solid crust.
Only one planet in each system was passing through
the climax in its history, and near it my rapture became
too great to bear; my veins seemed on the point of
bursting with the fulness of life; my soul was dragged
above my natural level, till .the physical bonds which
fettered me were about to break, and I was glad to be
attracted to other circling orbs that with coarser but
stronger magnetism drew me to them. The median
point of balanced joy was reached when, resting be-
tween two spheres, I felt their magnetic currents
neutralise each other, and yet the higher influence of
the new system raise the pulsing of my spirit. As full
bliss was it when, darting from system to system, I ex-
perienced the power of life that dwelt in each, and felt
the varied types of existence mingling their magnetic
thought with mine; I could feel the struggling of
worlds up to their goal thrill through my spirit; on
the underside it was like the wail of one who has aban-
doned the upward conflict and plunged into the waters
of oblivion ; on its upper side it was like the fervour of
souls who see through mists of life the elysium they
have yearned for. I was conscious of the infinite
tragedy being enacted upon each orb, and yet not near
enough to see what destiny awaited it. I was drawn

148 Limanora

within the eddy of a new and loftier ambition; my
spirit perceived stages of being within its reach, yet
beyond all it had known; and it throbbed with new
eagerness to rise above itself. Nothing could be more
rapturous than the consciousness of this system beyond
system, each with its own type of life and stage of
spiritual aim, each with its peculiar medley of magnetic
influence, each drawn into its own vortex of emotion
and energy.

A touch on my hand broke the spell, and I was down
on earth again, exalted, yet knowing the contrast. It
was Thyriel, who would remind me of my duty to my
own being and to the state. I arose and moved out
with her but she knew the ecstasy too well to break
in on my dream, and led me out to the sea arcade,
where I could hear the low rippling melody of the
waves beneath and the faint music of the world of air.
I turned my eyes up to the azure, and seemed to tread
amongst the orbs that veiled their silver radiance in the
blaze of noon. Out of my life, I am sure, the exalta-
tion never wholly vanished. I had been among the
living fountains of eternity. I had moved conscious of
the birth of worlds, and known the throb that is a
myriad of ages. Was this not to be kin with God, to
know the all-grasping passion of a moment of divine
life? Ever and again the greatness of the memory
flamed out into conflagration within me, and I was
then in the mood to make or conquer worlds; and
never wholly out of my blood died the exaltation I
had felt.

CHAPTER XI

A CATASTROPHE

BUT long years divided my first visit to Oomalefa
and my admission to Firlalain. I saw that there
were certain vast sections of Oomalefa that I was led
past; massive portals showed their rank, but the num-
ber on them defining the age at which entrance was
possible warned us off, and allegorical pictures adorn-
ing their arches figured the decay of tissue and cell that
would result in the youthful body from too early ad-
mittance. Any curiosity Thyriel or I could have felt
was repressed by these ominous symbols; for this
people never relied on mere authority. Their strongest
prohibitions were in the form of graphic appeals to the
reason, and only where these could not impress youth-
ful natures sufficiently were the emotions involved;
the influences of any special indulgence upon the
human system were represented in living form, which,
looked at through a medium magnifying them ten
thousand-fold, stirred the heart of all the more deeply.
We saw in a moment that we were unfit to enter Fir-
lalain, and we passed on into the vast series of baths
wherein the Umanorans could rid their bodies of ob-
structive or noxious elements. Here was every grade
of temperature endurable by their tissues: for every

149

150 Limanora

grade there was a separate swimming-pool in which
they could exercise themselves; and every hour auto-
matic machinery driven by force from Rimla sent the
contents of each pool into one of the lava wells, where
jn a few moments the water and all the debris thrown
off from the bathers' bodies vanished in fire. These
baths were so arranged that not more than two should
be empty together, and at the general entrance were
seated two medical counsellors, who measured and
tested the state and temperature of the body, and
showed graphically what would be the effect of enter-
ing each bath of the series to which the state of the
bather restricted him.

Far more important than these water baths were the
baths of ether, baths of magnetism, and solar baths, in
which any portion of the body or the whole of it could
be submitted to the purified forces of the world. From
the ethereal baths all terrene elements were exhausted,
and there remained the pure medium of life beyond
our atmosphere, the divine air which spiritual beings
breathe. Nothing so raised the power of the mind
over the body or the part of the body immersed in this.
It partially and for the time being dematerialised the
part, withdrawing its earthy tendencies, and giving it
an exhilarant atmosphere in which it acquired new life
and energy, and resisted the encroachments of lower
parasitic life. The two other kinds of baths had some-
what the same effect, but were less powerful than this.
Magnetism allowed the ether a more direct influence
than either water or air; it concentrated the force of
the purer medium on any point. The solar baths had
been used from time immemorial. It had been one of
the earliest discoveries of their science that the lower
organisations and microscopic forms of life that bat-

A Catastrophe 15 1

tened on the human frame lost vitality in the full
beams of the sun. Later their investigators had found
that solar radiance dispelled the vapours and terrene
elements which floated in the air, clinging invisibly to
bodies and forming the feeding-ground of quickly
generative microbes. It purified by its energy all that
it came into contact with, and in short allowed the
ether which was its medium freer play. For genera-
tions sunshine had been one of their most successful
curative agencies and was now used to reinforce and
stimulate human life and energy. The rays of the sun,
blanched to some extent of their heat and excessive
force, were concentrated in rooms made wholly of
transparent irelium, or upon irelium glasses of various
shapes and forms to suit the part of the body to be
subjected to their influence. These were their solar
baths; but their whole system of life was one con-
tinuous solar bath: for every corner of their houses
both public and private was laid open to the sun's in-
fluence from dawn to twilight, and this stored up in the
atmosphere of the rooms and halls forms of energy
which during the night gave ease and exhilaration to
those who slept. They fully realised that it was not
merely heat and light they got from the sun, but subtle
energies, a fine aroma from the diviner medium that
filled the interstellar spaces.

Kvery Limanoran of an age to be admitted to Ooma-
lefa resorted several times a day to each of these three
kinds of baths. First came a magnetic bath, in which
every organ and tissue was stimulated to throw off its
debris towards the pores. Then came the swim in one
or more of the pools, in order that all this rejected
part might be washed off. After this came the solar
bath, which penetrated into the superficial channels of

i52 Limanora

the body and swept away all bacterial life that might
be nocuous. The last stage was the ethereal bath,
which was enjoyed in solitude and could be endured by
any but the mature for only a few minutes; the ex-
hilaration and tenuity of atmosphere were too great for
unaccustomed lungs, and I could see the heads of the
bathers thrust out at short intervals to take a breath.
But long practice made the older Limanorans enjoy the
buoyancy of the pure medium for hours. It was in-
deed one of the hopes of the race that they would be
able at last to breathe the interstellar ether with greater
ease than the air surrounding their own earth.

It was in these baths I first came to see the marvel-
lous grace and plasticity of their garments. They
were outside of all my previous experiences and concep-
tions, and seemed so natural that I took them for a part
of their material outfit like their hair. It had never
entered into my mind to question whether they laid
them aside in sleep or not. Perhaps it was owing to
the beauty and animation of the countenance, when
they spoke or even looked, that I had not paid any
attention to their dress except to see how it never im-
peded their movements either in flight or in work, and
how it varied with the individual, and never with the
sex or age or profession; it belonged to the childhood
of the world to regiment men in the minor details of
life. Now I saw in the baths that the vesture did not
need to be laid aside in other elements than air. It
was made of some fine and flexible stuff woven out of
irelium threads, plastic to the shape, yet capable of
stiffening out when the wearer sent an electric wave
through it from the electro-generator he always bore
under his right arm. This process at once shook out
every drop of water from it, when he issued from the

A Catastrophe 153

bath or the sea. It was so porous that it seemed
fragile, and yet it could bear great strains. Through
its pores passed with ease the water or air or ether that
was to influence the body underneath; and along its
threads passed with ease any magnetism the wearer
wished to feel. In certain lights it was almost trans-
parent, yet with such a play of rainbow colors that it
seemed a living fence against lights and shadows. In
the darkness it shone with dazzling radiance as soon
as the electric current flowed into it. At the will of
the wearer it could be, like a magic garment of invis-
ibility, black as midnight, yet in daylight could reveal
every grace and tint of the limbs it covered, clinging
closely like an outer epidermis to the body. Nor was
it ever laid aside except to be replaced by a new ves-
ture, and that was every few days; for all germs and
debris that adhered to it or obstructed its pores could
be destroyed and got rid of by the electric current the
wearer had control of. It was on my first visit to
Oomalefa that I came to know these things, as it was
then that I first donned a like vesture, and was taught
its properties and the ways of managing it and the
minute electro-generator that went with it.

There were alternative garments, that they wore
under different conditions. One, almost as plastic as
the ordinary vesture, but armoured by electricity
against the inroads of excessive cold, was worn when
they ventured up into the higher regions of the air or
beyond; for it enabled them to keep up the natural
temperature of the body as they flew. Another was as
well suited for protection against extreme heat. It
consisted of an asbestine double wall of irelium, within
which was kept up a constant current of cold air by
means of a minute apparatus worked by their wings

154 Limanora

and arms; and, if they could get moisture from the
atmosphere to run between the two textile folds, it was
at once frozen. Such an arrangement was necessary
in their adventurous experiments in the bowels of the
earth or under the blazing eye of the sun. The most
beautiful and most convenient of all their vestures
was one which looked and felt like a film of white
cloud; I would have said that it was woven of the
misty fleeces that caught and rent themselves on the
lesser peaks of Lilaroma. It was indeed no distant
mimicry of this; for though it could be thrown loosely
round the figure in the most graceful forms like a toga,
and seemed as thin and fragile as gossamer, it consisted
of a treble fabric; between two transparent films, fairly
delicate as if woven by a spider on a windless dawn,
moved in cloud-like rJurity and dimness the airy vapour
of some liquid that shone as silvery and warm as moon-
light. Its purpose was to conceal and yet to reveal the
general contour and movements of the body; to sift
the strength of the sun's rays as they fell in their purity
from heaven, and yet to pass as much of their curative
power through it as the skin needed; to cling to the
limbs, and yet to impede them no more than a fleece of
cloud would.

It was as I was studying the texture and the beauty
of these garments that there happened the first ap-
proach to panic I had yet witnessed among this calm-
eyed people. There had been a stillness as of ill-bridled
tumult in the atmosphere all day. My proparents had
moved restlessly abroad from daybreak, and all the
Leomo were on the wing husbanding every minute with
feverish clutch. We were sent in squadrons to differ-
ent parts of the island, and many new leomorans were
set to work in unaccustomed corners of the mountain,

A Catastrophe 155

yet there was a look of baffled intelligence in every
face. I that felt there was an undeciphered portent
overshadowing their life. Thyriel and I had worked at
two new leomorans and watched them till they wielded
their brush of smoke across the sky. We had done all
that we could and were sent out to Oomalefa to uncloud
our troubled minds.

The excitement of this new sphere had removed from
our thoughts all ominous shadows and we were as
innocently absorbed as primitive men of the wood-
lands in the wonders now opened to us; but silence
had fallen upon the gambolling swimmers, and the
hush awakened us from our new dream. We felt the
foundations of the building tremble and quiver like a
panic-stricken beast. Up the translucent walls clicked
a huge rent, and slowly the liquid in the baths hissed
and vanished. A tumultuous muffled cannonade rolled
beneath us. The crystal roof crackled and snapped
like ice-rafts that groan and toss before a sudden flood.
The chink widened into a chasm, and through it we
could see the ocean seethe in turbulence and revolution.
Up through the roof whizzed the wings of the alarmed
bathers, and as the jarring and detonation grew, I
stood knowing not whither to turn. All I could do
was to bid Thyriel follow her mates. More awful
came back the reverberations from the domes, and
Thyriel' s face was pale and her lips set, but she did
not move. Finally she bade me follow her to that end
of the gallery farthest from the chasm in the walls, a
raised platform whence the swimmers dived. There
she placed me with my back to hers, and ran a rope
under my arms. Before I knew what she was about,
I was off my feet; she was running at full speed up
the rising platform and with a sudden jerk we were in

156 Limanora

the air. I heard the beating of her wings, and lay still
lest I should baffle her purpose. I lay on my back be-
tween her wings, and shuddered as I saw their points
broken against the lips of the chasm. A deep-mouthed
clangour filled my ears; and for a moment my eyelids
fell in palsied terror. When I raised them and looked
down, the vast crystal of Oomalefa had vanished and
the great promontory stood gaping, with the surf hiss-
ing and baying as it leapt over the upper surface.

I felt that Thyriel was almost exhausted, and thought
of detaching myself from the rope which bound me and
leaping into the ocean; but the idea had not quite
grown into resolve when I saw her wings beat slower
and knew that we were hovering over the solid land.
In a moment we were standing side by side, she
exhausted, I supporting her with my arms. It was
not long before she recovered herself, for her attention
had been awakened by a startling appearance out in
mid-ocean. A high peak rose beyond the cleft and
scarred promontory where there had been only waves
before, its head turbaned with steam and smoke. It
was still shouldering the sea to right and left with hiss
of lava tongue and splash of cinder shower. We could
not speak for alarmed wonder, and mingling with mine
there was deep sorrow over Oomalefa vanished. What
had become of it I could not tell. Thyriel roused her-
self and, divining my thoughts, led me to the steps
which had once given entrance to the starry portal.
She stooped and lifted in her hand some of what
seemed to me fine-sprinkled snow, that covered every
inch of rock. It was irelium dust. Once the cohesion
of the great edifice had been overcome by the shocks
of the earthquake, it fell not into fragments or huge
blocks, but into its constituent atoms. Nothing, I

A Catastrophe 157

thought, could ever replace the wondrous palace of
delights that I had only begun to know.

I felt saddened beyond recovery, as we turned home-
wards, over the ruin of such magnificence and so great
hopes. Thyriel's dejection, I discovered, was retro-
spective. She mourned over the failure of L,eomarie,
the earthquake art of her family and friends. They
had thought that they could anticipate and prevent all
the grumblings and revolutions of L,il aroma, and this
outbreak had shown the imperfection of their know-
ledge and the limits of their art. Though but a novice,
I could see that something was yet wanting to make
them masters of the crust of the earth. For the first
time for many generations their foresight had failed.
They had known that there was disturbance beneath
the mountain, but they had been unable to fix its
centre, which was far out at sea. The inflow of the
waters had baffled the power of their mountain-cupping
instruments, and the rapidly generated steam had rent
the crust in the line of Oomalefa; and until the slow-
trickling lavas and the swift-belched ashes had sealed
the lips of the chasm again, there was danger, they
knew, of the whole island exploding. How they were
to prevent or even anticipate such cataclysms was a
problem that weighed upon every member of the family
and saddened every leisure moment.

For some days the Leomo were busy with the
wreckage of the outbreak. I was attached to the sec-
tion that had to inspect the lava wells, gauge the
amount of molten matter which had oozed from each,
repair every clirolan or other instrument that had been
deranged, and replace those submerged. The urgency
of the occasion excused us from the regular duties and
pleasures of the day. All our ablutions and essential

158 Limanora

exercises were performed in the private mansions.
Most of the hours not spent in sleep were devoted to
the tasks made 'for us by the new exigency. The
excitement removed the monotony and burden of the
work, and almost before we knew that there was so
much to do it was done. New wells were sunk and
new clirolans fixed wherever the overflow had choked
or sealed the old. The instruments of even the most
distant section of the island were put into their best
working order.

Then we were free to scatter to the winds and to fol-
low our old delights. Thyriel set herself with renewed
eagerness to teach me the art of flight, and I attained
the power of describing an easy curve from a shoulder
of Lilaroma down to the plain. Again and again in
her new desire to master flight with me seated between
her wings, she carried me up to some jutting platform
of the mountain: and then she showed me how to work
the wing-engine with ease. I could keep level with
my starting-point for a few minutes, but after that I
had to let myself glide down the parabola of the air. I
was too heavily weighted by gravity and the inertia of
my muscles to rise as she did.

There were many secrets of their flight that I soon
understood. The curious construction of the wings,
formed as they were of two sliding membranes, I have
already described. What I had taken for a mere
rudder was a large series of small screws that gave
forward motion to the flight. The engine that whirled
them round as they churned the air was of great
power, and without them the flight would have been
but slow and clumsy. It was through inability to
manage this engine that I was so long in mastering
even the rudiments of the art.

A Catastrophe 159

I progressed greatly that day, and would have pro-
gressed more but that the lesson was abruptly broken
off. In each new air voyage to a higher sally-point
she bore me farther round the mountain towards the
great plain that stretched to the south. When we
reached our last flight platform, and I had descended,
my glance shot over the countless centres of industry
and investigation that stippled the rolling downs. It
was a noble sight, and I could have long rested in the
gaze: but an unwonted gleam drew my eyes to the
precipitous coast. There on a vast new promontory
which ran out miles into the sea was gathered such a
galaxy of jewelled domes rainbow-lit by the sun as I
could not have conceived even from my remembrance
of Oomalefa and its marvellous architecture. Thyriel's
eyes had also been riveted by the spectacle. "It is a
new Oomalefa," she burst forth. I could not believe
it ; how could such a palace of wonders be reconstructed
in so short a time? There were only a few thousand
mature Limanorans; and if they had been all engaged
on such a structure night and day it would have taken
many busy years to rear it. I took it for a mere illu-
sion. The position of the sun and some unusual com-
motion in the sea had produced it by reflection and
refraction. It was but a bubble of the imagination
bred by some abnormality in our eyes upon our memory
of Oomalefa and the grief of our minds at its evanish-
ment.

So I argued. But Thyriel was silently decided in
her dissent. We could take no more interest in our
aeronautics, nothing could keep our gaze from that
radiant orb resting, gigantic, on the beach. As the
sun declined the facets of the new jewel shimmered
with living sheen: now it was a city of burnished gold,

160 Limanora

again it was a myriad of lambent flames aspiring to the
centre of fire: now a thousand rainbows weaving and
unweaving themselves, again uncounted stars clustered
and heaped in restless silver, or wintry thistledown of
swarming snow. Surely it was but an army of will-o'-
the-wisps lit in the marsh fumes that the gaping sea
had sent forth. Yet as I gazed it grew in my mind
that this sparkling halo had a fixed centre; there was
symmetry in the refulgence and in the recurrence of
colour and sheen. It could not be illusion; we were
both transfixed like sculptures in eternal gaze.

The flash of wings broke the completeness of the
glory and our spell. Above the transplendent spec-
tacle fluttered a snow-storm of ariels; the sun shot a
fiery gleam through a rent cloud, and across his silvery
beams danced and played these winged motes. The
beauty of the sight moved us almost to tears. We
knew that this wa£ no phantom joy; our fellows were
aloft in the air hymning the glory of a new creation.
Soon Thyriel had persuaded me to start with her
towards the new palace of wonders. We had not got
half-way when I felt my arms weary and my flight
dragging towards the plain. She would not leave me
to trudge across the uneven earth; before I could
argue she had me safely nestling between her wings as
they beat the air upwards from the low knoll on which
we had alighted. She no longer laboured under her
burden, as she had done in her first attempt some days
before 5 yet I felt that she grew tired, and made her
land upon a hill a few miles from the new Oomalefa.
After a rest I was able on my own wings to curve down
towards its flight of new-rocked steps and its scintillant
portal.

We entered, and all was joy and music. Up under-

A Catastrophe 161

neath the new domes flitted the happy artists putting
the final touches on the tinted translucence of the
irelium walls. The plan was more elaborate and yet
simpler than the old Oomalefa. The beauty of it was
more overwhelming to the imagination of the eyes. I
could not have conceived two structures more unlike
from their larger architecture down to their minutest
detail of ornament, and yet so adapted to the one pur-
pose. The halls of medication and sustenance, the
galleries of the magnetic sense, the baths, the arcades,
and the sea balconies were all complete, yet as different
from those that had gone to dust as Western architec-
ture from Oriental. New instruments and apparatus,
new indexes and tests were there at work. Not a
detail had been neglected; but the rocky platforms
over the sea were broader, and when we flew into the
air and looked at it from above we could see that the
promontory stretched farther into the sea and was
broader both on its surface and at its base; and
strange to say, it had as its outermost point the new
peak that the eruption had thrown up in the ocean. It
was conjectured by the L,eomo, I soon knew, that this
line, now sealed up as it was and with its lava vent at
its outer extremity, would be freer from terrene par-
oxysms than any other portion of the island marge.
This was where my proparents and the rest of the
earth artisans had been engaged so busily during these
days; they had been guiding the lava flow along the
line of rent out through the sea to the great beacon
which the outburst had raised; and the dash of the
waves had cooled and congealed each layer as it flowed
and curdled from the new peak to the shore of the
island.

CHAPTER XII

BUT by what magic had this wondrous jewel group
of domes and spires and minarets grown upon the
platform within these few alternations of sun and dark ?
From my own experience of hastioning the shore I was
able to understand the rapidity with which the founda-
tions had been laid. My wonder grew all the more at
the marvellous piece of art that now stood upon them ;
every detail was so complete and so beautiful. The
giant forest aisle of Cologne Cathedral, the mosaic
splendour that had overawed me within St. Peter's,
the statued frost-work of Milan, seemed to me tawdry
beside the colossal domes with their jewelled magnifi-
cence and the infinite variety in simplicity of the laby-
rinth of arcades and galleries and arches. Yet those
were the fruits of a thousand years' faith and work ;
this was the product of a few days. The more I
thought of it, the more bewildered I was.

Thyriel divined my thoughts and saved me from my
perplexity. " You have never seen the Ooloran," she
exclaimed. I asked her what it was. I could see that
the word might be translated sonarchitect. Her de-
scription of it, though lucid as usual, did not convey to
my slow thoughts a full idea of the instrument; and

162

Oolorefa 163

we got permission to visit Oolorefa, or the hall of archi-
tecture, the following day.

In the multiplicity of wonders throughout L,imanora
I had failed to notice this great edifice, although it
stood on a level, symmetrically cut plateau, command-
ing all the region in which were gathered most of the
exceptionally great and magnificent structures of the
island, and was but one of a series of gleaming palaces
which crowned the points of the rocky spurs of L,ila-
roma. In each palace was concentrated some one of
the services that the new civilisation had to offer to the
progress of the race. I had visited a few of them, and
it was part of the programme of my education to make
me spend such space and time in each as the desire or
the necessity arose in my life; but it had never struck
me to inquire how the marvellous buildings had arisen.
Nor, though I had noticed the frequent change of out-
ward shape and ornamentation of parts of the mansion
of my proparents, had I ever had leisure or curiosity
to find out the reason or source of the transformations.
It was delightful to see the growth of the building and
to remove into the new parts; and as silently and
invisibly the sections we had left vanished. I had
never time to grow tired of one chamber or set of
chambers before another was ready for me. It was
like the growth of a palace of dreams; but I soon ac-
cepted it as one of the magic habits of the island, a
natural feature of my life, never rousing query and
seldom awakening even thought. So much of new
and striking was crowded into the days and months
and years that large portions of the civilisation had to
pass uncommented on and ultimately unnoticed.

With the same wonder with which in later life we be-
gin to watch the marvellous workings of the functions of

1 64 Limanora

our bodies I entered on my new investigation. As we
approached Oolorefa it seemed to me that we had made a
mistake and come to the wrong building; for it rang
with the most entrancing music and I thought that it
must be the cathedral of the island. It had one vast
central dome surrounded by countless cupolas, and as
we skirted the edifice I heard underneath each of these
smaller roofs sweet melodies sounding too low to be
heard beyond its partition walls and almost drowned in
the thunderous diapason of the central dome. These
I took for chapels and fanes subsidiary to the great
temple, round which they clustered.

We entered and I was amazed to find under what I
had thought to be the temple of the island a great
mansion, but dwarfed by the height and size of the
temple roof. The fence enclosing it had just been
shaken to dust by their new electric process for the
atomising of irelium. What was to be done with
the new structure? It was walled in by the giant
cupola, and could not possibly be removed. The
thought was beating about in my mind, but ceased
before a sudden crash; I looked up and there, one
complete and evenly cut quadrant of the dome had
vanished, and the bright sun shone in undimmed by
any medium. I again noticed something going on
around us. Great flanks like the sides of a ship were
fitted to the bottom of the new building, and along
them underneath were adjusted huge floats. Wings
were then attached to either side, and a strong wing-
engine was placed in the body and two rudder-engines
in the after-part of the raft. They were rapidly charged
with electricity, the floats were exhausted of their
heavier air, and up rose the whole structure through
the huge aperture in the dome; and I could see its

Oolorefa 165

pilots guide it this way and that through the air to fit
the unequal and varying wind that blew, till at last it
disappeared round a shoulder of Lilaroma. I had run
out of Oolorefa to watch the flight of the great mansion
on its aerial raft, and when it went out of sight I re-
turned, reflecting with a sigh of relief that this ex-
plained the magic growth of the house in which I lived;
the additions had arrived and been fixed and adapted
to the purposes of human habitation while I was sleep-
ing or absent on my daily pursuits.

I was startled when I got back to find the dome com-
plete again and preparation being made for construct-
ing some other irelium shell. The fence- work had
been raised. By its wall stood the key-board of a
gigantic organ-like musical instrument, the other half
of which was so arranged within the new framework
that the whole volume of its sound should bear upon
whatever the fence enclosed. A • huge bell mouth
opened out into the chamber; and I soon saw that out
of this issued a snow-storm of irelium particles which
floated lightly in the air. A peal of music rang out
from the instrument, and I saw the dust motes settle
rapidly into a symmetrical figure, that minute by
minute grew into a gigantic nautilus shell. The musi-
cian who sat at the key-board watched the snow-whirl
within and the magical rise of the walls. I perceived
that the bar of music was repeated again and again,
with gradual ingrafting of variation as the shell-like
walls bent over. At a certain point where the whorl
began to incurve backwards the strain completely
changed and reminded me of a fugue. Back and forth
it shot its monotonous shuttle of sound. I was spell-
bound by the cradling melody and the sinuous flexure
of the vast conch. The completion of the process and

1 66 Limanora

the cessation of the music broke the spell, and I pressed
near to ask explanations and to see the result. Some
enchanter's power must surely have drawn in the float-
ing particles to the thin curves of the structure and
held them there; for the motes continued to float un-
attracted, but in sparse and sparser cloud; and at last
they ceased to move, and settled on the fence, dimming
its translucence. I felt the metal floor grow first hotter
and hotter, and then cooler and cooler till it was ice-
cold. Within a fraction of an hour the whole process
was complete; the fencing walls were shaken to dust,
and there stood the gigantic nautilus perfect in its grace,
clear as crystal but for the frostwork of nautilus pat-
terns all over its surface. It was a new experiment in
form for a winged ship of the air, and as I stood the
wings were added and the engines put on board. The
navigators embarked; a smaller quadrant of the dome
crashed aside; and out by the aperture floated this
huge air-bubble rainbow-lustrous in the sun.

Thyriel led me to the vacant space whence the air-
ship had been launched ; and there I was shown how
powerful magnets made the snow-storm sweep so rapidly
downwards and held the irelium dust in position, once
it had taken shape. Then the alternate floors were
exhibited to me, one emanating heat which melted the
new structure into a permanency, and another that re-
duced the temperature below freezing-point and com-
pleted the architectural process by chilling the metal.
There were other floors easy of substitution by means
of leverage and the application of great force; as one was
withdrawn, another was run into its place. One was
suited for one chemical process, another for another.
A second set were for applying to the walls of the new
structure different forms or grades of electricity. A

Oolorefa 167

third set could infuse into them various kinds of con-
creting fluids to make them cohere when the heating
and chilling process was likely to fail. This was the
great Ooloran that I had come to see, and only the
most skilled musician and architect was allowed to sit
down at the key -board.

In order to show me the part that music took in this
swift architecture, I was led round the circle of sub-
chapels, that I had seen surrounding the great dome.
In these were employed the various draughtsmen of
Oolorefa. In the first we entered the experimenter was
engaged in seeking the most beautiful form for a new
mansion which was to be placed up amongst the snows
of Lilaroma; it would have to withstand great gusts of
wind and at times heavy drifts of snow; it would also
have to bear a variety of high temperatures within in
order to protect the dwellers from the bitterness of the
night. The building was meant for those who had to
watch the storm-cone and keep it in perfect working
order. The draughtsman was using a miniature Ool-
oran, and deftly sounding various musical notes, and
sometimes songs into its irelium dust whirlwind; but
there was always one predominating note, meant to in-
troduce into each experiment a feature that had been
before tested and found suitable. He fixed his experi-
ments by means of his small movable floors, and then
placed the resulting forms in order along a shelf, attach-
ing to each the score of music which had produced it.
It was like a collection of toy observatories. Within
a neighbouring compartment of like transparent walls
another artisan submitted each of the models to the in-
fluences of stress and strain, of heat and cold, of snow
pressure and tornado violence that the ultimate and
full-sized mansion would have to undergo. One sue-

i68. Limanora

climbed to the heat, another to the severe cold, a third
to an avalanche from above, a fourth to a gust of wind.
He marked the flaw in each and the influence that had
brought it out, and handed the model back to the
draughtsman, who at once corrected the note or notes
in the score of music which symbolised the flaw.
When the result of the experimentation was complete,
the score of the music and the miniature fabric were
sent to the central dome; and in less than an hour the
huge mansion was on its winged raft speeding towards
its destination far up the great mountain-slope.

I was led through the whole series of experimenting
chapels; in each was there a miniature sonarchitect pro-
ducing test forms for special purposes under the skilled
hands of creative workmen and their pupils. In most
of them new designs were being produced for private
houses; for of these was needed the greatest variety,
as each islander had his home renewed so frequently.
I could not have conceived that so many different
forms could be created for the same purpose; indeed
the number seemed to be limited only by the possible
combination of notes of music and the need of adapting
each design to habitation and the habits of the dwell-
ers. The skill of the artist lay in the selection of the
proper forms out of the multitude he daily evolved, and
in their adaptation to the necessities of lyimanoran life.
It was in these designs that the younger members of
the architect families were engaged ; thus they learned
their art and developed their creative instincts.

Under some cupolas which we visited we found ex-
periments on new designs for the large public buildings,
and to these the wisest members of the families were
applying their century-tried skill. As we approached
any such chapel, we could hear the most elaborate and

Oolorefa 169

entrancing music, for the design in such cases was
labyrinthine, and needed the noblest artistic faculties
to select and develop it. The executive musical talent
displayed and the talent of extemporaneous composi-
tion and modification would have been called genius in
European communities; btit this people had no word
corresponding to the quicksand of meaning this word
covers in Christendom. They knew the origin and
growth of each faculty, even when exceptionally de-
veloped, too well to attribute it to an indefinable some-
thing which nature had somehow conferred upon a
chance-chosen individual. They knew as exactly the
causes that produced given effects in the human system
as they could calculate the forces of the inanimate
world, and had no belief in the power of nature to give
to human work by some caprice more value than it
deserved and that deranged all calculation. This
criticism I brought down on me from my guide when I
expressed amazement at the beauty of the music and the
resulting design in one chapel, and attempted to trans-
late the word "genius" into Limanoran. Such ex-
pressions, he persuaded me, are but the half-articulate
escape-valves of wide-mouthed ignorance; they mean
no more than a confession of blindness and incapacity,
and should be rapidly rejected by 'every progressive
civilisation. The musical and designing power of this
particular Limanoran belonged to most in his family
of his own age, and was merely the stage the art of
sonarchitecture had reached in its development on the
island. Wherever a nature especially adapted to the
double art was found it was imported into the family
to reinforce it.

In spite of the dissertation, I could not but listen,
entranced by the intricate splendour of the music; and

1 70 Limanora

my eyes were riveted on the growing design within
the receiver of the Ooloran. Yet when finished
and tested it was found inadequate to the artist's new
conception of the utilities of the ultimate- edifice. It
was shaken again into dust before I left the workman,
and its faults were noted and corrected in the score of
music which he had before him. He had been years
on this single design, which he had been moulding and
improving every day; and he hoped soon to find a
form that would be strikingly new and in every feature
adapted to the purpose of the building.

I could well understand now that the new Oomalefa
was no work of magic; but I was still unable to see
how its vast proportions could have been shifted from
its place of fabrication to its ultimate site. Thyriel
led me to a new structure which had just issued from
the central sonarchitect; and the master- workman bade
me lean upon it; huge though it was, it shifted before
my weight and I fell. It was as light as if made of
silk, and we two could lift it from the floor. This ex-
plained the ease of rafting the great edifices through the
air; but how did they resist the winds that blew, or
the impact of wave and storm ? I was led to a wall of
Oolorefa itself; and I was bidden to raise one low
parapet of it ; riot the application of my greatest
strength could move it. My guide then waved what
seemed to be a magnet above it, and bade me try again ;
it rose in my hands and my muscular effort landed me
on my back. He showed me how the foundations of
their buildings were powerful magnets, and how the
fabric would be torn to pieces before it could be hoisted
off them unless an equally powerful magnet was ap-
plied in another direction. I now understood the
strength of their structures before winds and the

Oolorefa 171

rapid disappearance of Oomalefa after the earth-
quake.

But I had seen only one department of Oolorefa, that
which consummated the work of the rest. One branch
of the sonarchitect families was specially charged with
experimentation on the materials for building. Ire-
lium was the general name for the metallic combination
of elements best suited to the state of civilisation they
had reached; but there were innumerable modifica-
tions and grades of it, and there were more being
discovered every day. We entered one magnificent
building, and there found a dozen or more workmen,
each isolated in a transparent chamber and busy with
some combination of irelium and one or other of the
stellar metals. Every star or series of stars had its
own predominant and characteristic element or amal-
gam of elements; and it was a main duty of one
of the chemical families of the island to examine every
star for its new element and to find something cor-
responding to it in terrene matter. This section of
the people studied with the most anxious care the pro-
ducts and the results of the leomorans; they visited
almost hourly the mouths of the lava wells and watched
the spectroscopic recorders of the fumes that rose out
of them; for they seldom failed to find at one time or
another some constituent of the interior of the earth cor-
responding to any new stellar element or metal recently
discovered. Whenever it was found in any leomoran
a chamber for its deposition was constructed and the
clirolan was specially adapted to the preservation of
all of it that issued out of the bowels of the earth.
These new metallic constituents were called by the
name of the stars in which they predominated, and were
at once put into the hands of the sonarchitect families

Limanora

to be tested for structural utilities. It was thus ireliutn
had been discovered, and thus they hoped to find ma-
terials still more plastic to their purposes. Already
they had so modified their new metal by amalgamation
with other stellar metals that they had fitted it to func-
tions no inetal had served before; it could be made
flexible or tough, light or heavy, transparent or opaque,
malleable or brittle, soluble before heat or water or
electricity, or resistent to any or all of them; it was
difficult to say what quality they could not impart to
it; and here I could see the workmen testing new com-
binations in order to find new qualities or new grades
of a quality already found. I stood and watched one
who was trying an amalgam of a new stellar metal
called vanelium with gold; he had already attempted
to combine it with iron, silver, copper, irelium, and
found it in each case either impossible or useless; but
the reactions had pointed him to gold as its natural
ally; and now, having found the two combine with
ease, he was exhausting the various possibilities of
combination in different proportions, and after submit-
ting the new amalgam to his tests, was recording the
results. It gave a marvellous toughness and elasticity
to gold, so that, when beaten thin enough for a breath
to raise it in the air, it could not be torn except by
sudden and great mechanical force. Another workman
near him was testing the effect of electricity on the
various grades of the new amalgam and recording the
results minutely. In each of the crystal chambers
there were at hand supplies of all the forms of energy
that might be needed, such as heat, cold, pressure,
electricity. Each workman was isolated in order that
the elements he used might not interfere with the ex-
periments of his neighbour; but his workshop was

Oolorefa 1 73

transparent, that he might beckon for help at any mo-
ment, or exhibit to his fellows the result of any experi-
ment without modifying the conditions or breaking the
continuity.

A third branch of these families dealt with the
adaptation of the new amalgams to the various struc-
tural necessities of the community; they found out
which form or grade would resist the disintegrating
influence or the power of water or of electric force;
they tested what shape would best suit each grade,
solid or hollow, cylindrical or spheral, cubic or rec-
tangular, thin or thick, curved or rectilinear. Another
branch devoted itself to the means of making the
various metals or amalgams cohere either temporarily
or permanently. A fifth studied the adaptation of the
new discoveries to tools and machines and to the in-
vention of new mechanical forms that would bring out
their greatest utilities. To go through all the depart-
ments of this vast architectural workshop would need
a week's rehearsal. To my first view it seemed be-
wildering in its complexity of specialisation; but after
closer acquaintance it became simplicity itself, in fact
the only plan that nature itself could have pointed out.

CHAPTER XIII

THE ULARAN

HAVING finished our survey of Oolorefa, my mind
returned to the observatory for Lilaroma, which
I had seen growing in miniature under the modeller's
hand and music. It seemed to me a strange romance
that citizens of this beautiful island lived amid ever-
lasting snow and ice tens of thousands of feet above
their fellows. How could those who were accustomed
to the conditions and privileges I saw around me bring
themselves to surrender it all and live the lives of
hermits amid antarctic rigours ? Thyriel reminded me
of the glacial cold of the southern land from which
their ancestry had come; but this did not wholly
satisfy me. The long centuries of life in a new zone
had changed their powers and tastes, and it must be a
great sacrifice to live in a climate so different as was
the glacier region of a mountain. My curiosity was
roused, and I resolved to observe and know for myself
at the earliest opportunity. I could see the observa-
tory now perched on the gleaming shoulder of the
mountain above the circle of the storm-cone, and every
day I turned my eyes upwards I grew more eager to
inquire into the conditions of life in so different a
temperature.

i74

The Lilaran 175

It happened that the next department of the civilisa-
tion of the island that had to be studied by me in our
educational development was Lilarie, or the science of
island-security. We were handed over to one who be-
longed to the lyilamo, or families specially absorbed in
this section of practical knowledge, and were told to
choose our mode of ascent, car flight or wing flight,
or either of the two instantaneous methods of transit.
We preferred one of the two last, so he decided on the
wire-line or aerial method for our first ascent. We
were enclosed in a casing, shaped like a shuttle and
rounded and sharpened to a point at each end; it lay
slightly inclined on a close web of wires, which sloped
up to the mountain- top. The door was closed and
made secure, but, as our shuttle car was made of trans-
parent irelium, we could see on all sides. It was then
drawn slightly upwards into a complete enclosure of
wires, each of which touched it at some point. When
our guide saw that we were all ready, he pressed a
button, and we shot up at incredible speed. The whole
sky and earth and sea fell from us in an instant. I
closed my eyes in alarm. No sooner had I done so
than the whizzing sound which accompanied our flight
ceased and in a moment we were at our destination,
close to the peak of Ijlaroma. Our shuttle car slid
into another groove and rested; the door opened, and
I stood amid the eternal snows. I could see the great
buildings of Rimla and Oomalefa and Oolorefa like
minute soap-bubbles gleaming in the sun far below.
We had travelled these tens of thousands of feet with
the ease and swiftness of lightning; for it had indeed
been the lightning that had borne us up. Along this
cylinder of wires so great an electric power could be
sent that it seemed to undo the force of gravitation.

1 76 Limanora

Distance was almost annihilated by this mode of transit.
It outdistanced sound, if not light too, in its magic
motion.

As soon as I began to reflect, I was astounded to
find the cold not merely bearable, but deprived of its
bitter penetrativeness. My heart bounded with ex-
hilaration; every tissue of my body seemed elastic and
full of spring. I could account for these sensations by
the atmosphere of these heights, but how was I to
explain the mild temperature of this snow region ?
When puzzling over the problem, I began to notice a
haze of half-glowing light like the shimmer of heat
over the surface of the earth at blazing noon. It
seemed at first to be an optical illusion coming, I
thought, from the suddenness of my transference from
the plain to such a height, but its unsteady gleam
moved so uniformly that I soon saw it was outside of
me. Yet it did not intercept my view of the snow and
ice around. They fascinated me by their splendour of
whiteness, but there was a warmth, a pallid glow over
them that was quite unwonted. Our guide felt my
mental interrogation, and pointed out that we had
stepped from the shuttle car on to a movable platform,
which would soon bring us to the observatory; over
this platform was an electric covering, that protected
us from the outer air and radiated heat in all direc-
tions. He showed us the snow melting on all sides of
our platform in form corresponding to it, and, as it
moved along the steep, the dark honeycombed square
of snow moved with us. There was above and on
every side of us an electric field produced by unseen
circuits of wires; and these fields gave out heat falling
short of light.

This was how they modified the climate up in

The Lilaran 177

these glacial regions and made it even sweeter and
healthier than the purified atmosphere of the Lirna-
noran plateaux below. They had done much for the
climate of the lower levels; by daily casting their elec-
tric shuttles through the atmosphere they brought its
impurities to the earth, its particles of dust and minute
living organisms; but as more of these crowded in again
from the outlying regions of air, the electric shuttles
would have to ply ceaselessly in all directions in order
to keep the lower strata pure. In those mountain
altitudes the air was naturally sterilised to a large ex-
tent; few organisms could persist in so keen a medium;
and the constant use of electric walls and roof for
modifying the bitterness of the cold swept every trace
of bacterial life into the snow. Hence the purity of
the air we breathed up there and the buoyancy of the
soul. The body seemed no clog upon the spiritual
functions, and the magnetism that came from the
heavenly bodies uniting with that of the earth had free
play upon our minds, stimulating them to lofty flight.
I no longer wondered why the L,ilamo had no aver-
sion to life at this altitude. They passionately loved
it. It was, indeed, being drunk without wine, without
self-abandonment, without waste of tissue.

They kept strict rein on this intoxication, ethereal
though it was; for, like all their race, they had
severe practical issues before them. Daily each of
them returned to the less volatile and less pure air of
the lower levels in order to check excess of buoyancy
and to reinforce the graver purposes of life by consulta-
tion with the elders and wise men. They had in their
hands an important phase of the well-being and con-
tinuance of their race. They had all the foes of human
life, as it existed amongst the Urnanorans, to fight off,

178 Limanora

whether seen or unseen. The tornadoes that swept
across these subtropical regions, the climatic strata
that drifted from other lands or realms of space, the
bacterial swarms bringing plague in their train, the
lower-planed human life which might swoop down on
their shores from the archipelago around them, — all
these had to be watched and directed past Limanora.
Any one of these evils might in a few hours or days
sweep out the civilisation that had taken long centuries
to develop and leave them all their steps to retrace.
Eye-tense vigilance was needed to watch for any sign
of their approach, and the keenest invention to prevent
their advance when observed.

I had not long to wait for evidences of the great ser-
vices the Lilamo did to their country. Thyriel and I
were led by our guide into the various divisions of the
observatory. We inspected the innumerable testing
and controlling machines without fully understanding
their intricate and often subtle arrangements. Had
we not been acquainted with Rimla and Oomalefa
and Oolorefa, we should have been bewildered or even
awestruck. As it was we were amazed at the refine-
ment of purpose in the apparatus, approaching almost
to human intelligence; but we saw that a mere novice
would have deranged most of it, so nice were the ad-
justments.

Our attention had been especially arrested by the
electric indicator or tremolan. It contained a complete
chart of the electric variations of every point of the
island throughout every day in the year. This had
been compiled and drawn up from the observations of
several centuries, and marked the differences between
periodical and temporary, regional and narrowly local,
terrestrial and planetary variations. Every day the in-

The Lilaran 179

strument was set like a clock to all the electric changes
which they expected to occur periodically on that day.
Each of these, indicated at every point of the map, re-
presented an electrically uniform locality of the island
with which it was connected. The superintendent of
the tremolan for any section of the day specially studied
all the unclassified variations which had occurred at the
corresponding hour of the same day and period of time.
He knew every change in the position of the earth or
in the movements of the stars that might affect the
electricity of the atmosphere at any moment during his
watch. Along with him there was a sky- watcher, who
used one of their marvellous reducers of distance and
magnifiers to scan the sky and the whole horizon, and
reported every new appearance which broke the uni-
formity of the sky-line. In an adjoining chamber with
transparent partitions a third observer was stationed
with his ear at a makro-mikrakoust or vamolan, that
gathered in the slightest sounds at the distance of even
hundreds of miles and magnified them for the listening
sense applied to it; it also indicated approximately the
distance of the source of the sound by an automatic
calculator. This was a kind of eavesdropper that
could pick up whispers on the orb of the earth, just as
their astronomical instruments could catch the faintest
gleam in space myriads of miles beyond the scope of the
eye. In another crystal-walled apartment stood a
fourth watcher, who used an instrument that was
to his electric sense what the telescope is to the
eye and their vamolan was to their ear. With this
idrolan he swept the sky for new and unclassified
electric impulses; and the faintest and most distant
indication, quite unrecognisable by his unaided sense,
was magnified ten thousand-fold; at the same time

180 Limanora

the distance of the source was roughly measured and
indicated.

This was by far the most attractive group of chambers
for us. Not only could we test the wonderful instru-
ments for ourselves; but we could examine by aid of
magnifiers the graphic results of their observations
automatically recorded as if by photography. We
could minutely study the flight of sea birds not visible
to the naked eye. The babel of sounds that went on
in the cities of the archipelago quite beneath the hori-
zon we could hear like a great roar beside us when we
placed the sonoscripts in the sound-magnifier; and with
the aid of its analyst we could unravel the sounds by
repeating them slowly. Though I had not my
electric sense sufficiently developed to feel the differ-
ences in the starry impulses when the electrographs
were placed in the electro-magnifier, I could distin-
guish their differing degrees of force, and I could see
how much Thyriel appreciated the fine shades of variety
in the impulses.

We were engaged in testing the electric records, when
we could see the observer of the tremolan bustling from
table to table and map to map, whilst his pupil watched
the indicator. His excitement spread into the adjoin-
ing chambers, and their occupants, leaving their instru-
ments to assistants, came to his aid. There was an
inexplicable electric disturbance on the north-east
shore of the island; the field in that direction was
agitated. They ran to the idrolan and turned it to the
north-east; at once they knew that some seven or eight
hundred miles off there was advancing at a rapid rate a
great wave of electric disturbance. We all recognised
a growing sultriness of heat in the profound calm of
the atmosphere even at those icy heights. No time

The Lilaran 181

was to be lost. All the members of the Lilamo were
called up, and in a few minutes were assembled in the
observatory.

It was resolved to turn the whole force available in
the island into the storm-cone, and especially into that
part of it which could shoot masses and streamers of
electric energy out to great distances in the atmo-
sphere. Other indications of an approaching tornado
soon appeared. The great telescope discovered a vast
cloud of birds on the horizon, and the sea greatly
agitated by shoals of fish beneath them. The vamolan
analysed the sounds made by the birds and revealed
that they were not all of one species; sea birds small
and great were predominant; but there was no lack of
land birds, insect-eaters chiefly, and a few great flesh-
eaters, vultures, hawks, and falcons. The Lilamo
knew in a moment what this meant. Myriads of
microbes were afloat in the air in front of the storm,
and the sky in the van of the cloud of birds was
obscured by the mass of insect life battening on the
unseen plague. The fish had gathered to eat the
clotted life that dropped into the ocean, and the sea
birds had assembled in pursuit of the fish. It was a
striking sight, this great moving internecine slaughter
and feast. Seated at a clevamolan, or combination of
telescope and makrakoust, we were present at the
scene, though hundreds of miles off. We could see
the swoop of the vultures down on the land birds, too
busy with their banquet of insects to foresee their own
fate, the water boiling with the leap of the fish and the
dive of the sea birds, and the air turbid with the flash
and glimmer of wings; at the same time we could hear
the war of jubilance and dismay, the wild cry of fore-
tasting appetite, and the still wilder death-shriek; and

1 82 Limanora

round and through the clangour like an atmosphere
moved the dull hum of happy glutted insect life. It
sickened us and we had to cover our eyes and ears to
shut out the carnage. We had forgotten that we had
been using the clevatnolan, and were glad to find that
we could leave it and return to the ordinary powers of
our senses; there was a speck on the horizon, which
might be a boat at sea for anything our eyes could
make out; whilst to our hearing there was the pro-
foundest calm.

Everything was ready for the concentration of our
millions of horse-power in tfce direction of the north-
east, when a new but by no means unexpected phase
of the phenomenon occurred. Word came up from the
north-east shore that a plague had broken out amongst
the dwellers in the district, and that the medical wise
men had been summoned to their help. The Lilamo
had already given warning that something of this kind
might be expected in that quarter, and the physicians
were by this time removing all the Limanorans in the
north-east to Oomalefa. So dense a cloud of insects
was not there without the attraction of superfluous
bacterial life. Not always was a tornado thus heralded
and vanguarded by a winged army, but when it was,
it meant the migration under magnetic impulse of
clirolanic plague-swarms from some favourite breeding
area.

As soon as it was thus known that the bacterial
couriers of the storm had reached the shores of L,ima-
nora, the electric forces of the lilaran were brought
into play, and we could see lightnings belch forth which
seemed to make the north-east atmosphere and ocean
glow. Swiftly the shoals of fish were gathered close to
the bastions of the coast, for masses of insects were fall-

The Lilaran 183

ing every moment into the water. Soon we could see
our lightnings reach as far as the insect darkness and
the bird cloud. The air cleared and the surface of the
sea was covered with death. Away to the west screamed
and shrieked the survivors of the winged army. Then
could we see the pitchy midnight of the coming tempest
moving stealthily towards us; and its heralds howled
and shrieked through every crevice of our mansion.
It was bearing right on Lilaroma.

How could that battering-ram of heaven's fury be
turned aside or evaded ? It seemed to me that nothing
but death and destruction were before us. I had al-
ready seen a tropical cyclone level a gigantic forest
clean as a mower would clear his swath in his breast-
high corn. What could man do in presence of so ter-
rific a force but hide hi holes of the rocks? The
thought of those noble buildings levelled with the dust
mingled sadness with my fear and shook all cowardice
from it. What was the immolation of animal exist-
ence which I had just witnessed compared to the de-
struction of all this people had done ? I felt as if the
torch of the world's salvation were about to be extin-
guished.

There was no sadness or languid inaction of despair
about the other inmates of the observatory. All was
bustle and joyous effort for a time as in veterans quiver-
ing with the passion of battle. Every man had his
duty and place; and every woman was there, too, in the
ranks of champions. We could now see the nucleus
of the storm just above the horizon, a mass raven-black.
At once the whole power of the island was concen-
trated in the electric charge of the lilaran ; and a long
tongue of flame shot straight for the dense cloud. As
if by magic the whole atmosphere was in a moment

184 Limanora

ablaze with lightnings. The sea was cloven into bil-
lows of raging foam, and seemed itself to aid in the
hellish pyrotechny. It shot forth great tongues of
purple flame, yet fled with reared crest from the strokes
of the storm-flail. Slowly the lilaran moved its light-
ning-thrust away to the east. Then half the island
power was put into the blast of the storm-cone; and
we could see the war of elements and the thunderous
scowl of the tempest shift round the circle of the hori-
zon, instead of bearing down on us. For hours the
roarof the lilaran went on. The edge of the tornado
struck us, and the building shook and swayed. Hail
pelted its sides; rain and snow blinded our outlook;
we could see not one inch outside for the gloom. Yet
within, all was radiant and calm. They knew that the
centre of the tornado had passed many miles to the
east, and that its trailing skirts could do no harm to
anything in the island. Even if it had come straight
on Lilaroma, they had given a vent to its fury so many
leagues out to sea that its force would have been largely
spent before it reached the shore. It was a yearly
occurrence, this throttling of a tornado from the
tropics; for these great electric disturbances made
straight for the loftiest peak within their reach, drawn
by their polar complement, the masses of electric
energy which played within the heart of L,ilaroma.

One of the ordinary duties of the Lilamo was to milk
the great mountain of its electricity, in order that it
should offer less attraction to cloud and storm. Every
night, especially during the season of tempests, I could
hear the roar of the energy out of the earth, and, if I
looked up to the shoulders of the mountain, I could
see at a hundred points the purple streamers flicker in
the wind like living, moving flame-flowers growing

The Lilaran 185

out of the soil. When needed, this escaping energy
was collected and sent down to Rimla for storage and
was another of the numerous sources of power that that
treasury of force drew upon.

When the tornado had passed and left its huge con-
tribution to the snows of the peak, the lilaran was
stopped, and the electric energy used in it was rapidly
run over the white slopes that now obliterated every
trace of the great groove and railway on which the
storm-cone moved. In a few minutes the outline ap-
peared, and soon the whole circlet was cleared of its
encumbering snows. So the weight that pressed on
the roofs of the observatory and the drifts that kept the
light from its walls melted before the electric snow-
plough. The storm had not vanished an hour before
all on the peak of Lilaroma was as it had been when
we arrived, except for the greater purity of the snow
on its shoulders. Beneath, the brush of the tempest
had swept out all traces of the plague that the physi-
cians had not got rid of, and the atmosphere was
clearer and more exhilarating.

So calmly and fearlessly had the whole danger been
met that there had even been leisure in the midst of the
turmoil to discuss this great waste of natural power.
It took them as many days as the tornado lasted hours
to generate and store in Rimla all this energy which
was now falling useless, or rather mischievous, upon
the face of the ocean. Could they not yoke the cyclone
as they had yoked the billows and the winds, the rivers
and the snows, the lightnings and the central fires of
the earth ? There was nothing impossible to a peo-
ple who had tamed the raging of the volcano and the
earthquake. The difficulty was the very greatness of
the force. Any machinery they might erect would be

1 86 Limanora

trampled to pieces by the brute power of the giant
they yoked. Here was a problem worthy of their
most imaginative men, of their most inventive faculties.

Not a year had passed before a trial was made, and
within a decade the machinery was complete for storing
the energy of the tempests. An immense cave was
hollowed out in the rocks of L,il aroma, and its mouth
was extended out into the ocean for miles by means of
lava bastions. In it was placed enough of the alloy
called labramor, or electricity sponge, to take in trillions
of horse-power of electric force. At first cables con-
taining millions of wires were floated out towards the
coming tornado and electric fields were raised in the air
to tap the energy of the blackness. This was con-
tinued afterwards to some extent; but it was found
that, if only the clouds were electrically tapped, most
of the current transmitted itself to the receivers in the
cave by means of the water of the ocean. It was thus
unnecessary to float out towards the storm more than
one cable, so binding to the shore a great raft which held
up many labrolans or electricity milkers towards the
blackening sky. They acknowledged that they lost by
this water-transmission much of the energy emitted
from the clouds; for the ocean bore it away in all direc-
tions; but they got as much of it as they needed to
fill their storehouse, and they killed the cloud monster;
at least it floated away across the horizon blowing a
mere gale that could do no havoc except upon the
careless and unforethinking.

One of the most singular effects of this new contriv-
ance was to rid the sea in the neighbourhood of the
island of its teeming life and to precipitate to the bot-
tom the matter that floated in the water. For weeks
after, we could see the rocks or streaming weeds in the

The Lilaran 187

depths as clearly as if it were an ocean of air. Its
emerald or azure had vanished, and white light poured
down into the hitherto unfathomed hollows and val-
leys. There could we see the dead denizens sway idly
with the forests of marine vegetation and here and
there the bulk of some monster lay tangled in the herb-
age. Only by degrees and after some months did the
colour and opacity return to the waves and the myriad
life stream from other regions into the void. The cur-
rents that swept past the coasts bore down the sus-
pended particles from other seas; and with them came
new fish and their parasites.

Until these came a new danger to the health of Um-
anora threatened. A few days after the tornado, the
precipitated organisms began to rise to the surface of
the water and underneath the hot sun to form breeding-
grounds for the dangerous microbes of the air. Up
against the bastions of rock beat the stench of the
living death. A plague threatened for a brief time;
but they were not a people to remain passive in pres-
ence of such a danger, even though they could easily
prevent its worst results by remedial measures. They
sank the dead organic masses again by means of a
charge of electricity, and then the deeper currents that
brushed their shores swept the corruption into the
great valleys of the ocean-bed, there to be embalmed
for geological ages hence.

They regretted that they should be the instruments
of this great waste of life before it had fulfilled the pur-
pose of its stage of development; but their regret was
tempered by the thought that it was a low and feeble
stage, that an infinity of such existence would not
weigh in the balance with one day's advance of a
single Limanoran, and that the energy set free by this

1 88 Limanora

wholesale dissolution of organisms was still ready for
other embodiments in the universe. The worst effect
they feared was upon their own natures; to destroy life
or deal with it frivolously was one of the worst offences
against their humanity, for it introduced into the mind
a brutalising element. Respect for life in all its forms
was one of the truest tests of a civilisation, they held.

And the L,ilamo were, almost as much as the physi-
cians, imbued with reverence for human life and with the
sense of the importance of preserving it and giving it
the longest opportunity in the individual to gain its
highest possibility. They had to protect their race
from all external foes. They had therefore to study
climatic changes and watch the sanitary conditions of
the island. Sanitation meant primarily the expulsion
of all hostile clirolanic life and the prevention of all
conditions that would attract it or form its breeding-
ground. They were especially interested in the mag-
netic and electric peculiarities of Limanora and of the
section of the globe in which they lived; for these
affected not only the health and spirits of the people,
but the amount of minute life that harboured in the
earth or floated in the atmosphere. They could by
an increase of these elements rid an unwholesome dis-
trict of its unhealthy conditions; and yet the in-
habitants of it could not remain whilst the process of
purification was going on. Too much magnetism or
electricity in the earth or air would endanger the
nervous balance of the human frame. The test in-
struments in the lava wells were frequently examined
to find the electric state of any section of the island ;
and one central electrometer was constantly recording
the electric state of the atmosphere in all parts of it.
Thus were they able to recharge by means of their

The Lilaran 189

apparatus whatever localities were found defective, and
tap those that had a superfluity; and over the country
at night the flame-like streamers lit up the darkness
here and there. But this occurred at rare intervals, for
it was only in certain conditions of the sun that the
earth sponged up more electricity than was good for
the highest life upon its surface.

The storm-cone as a rule was enough for sanitation.
By its wind force it could drift all dangerous clouds of
moisture or of bacterial life past Limanora. By its
electric-darting powers the heart could be squeezed out
of storms before they struck the shores. It regu-
lated the rainfall, depositing the contents of clouds by
day far out upon the sea and by night upon the thirst-
ing land. Sultry blacknesses that would otherwise
float past with only stifling effect were tapped, first
for their electricity and then for their rain. Storms of
dust that now and again darkened over the circle of
fog could be precipitated into the ocean partly by
electricity, partly by the blasts of the storm-cone.
The atmosphere was kept singularly pure and free
from deleterious germs or particles, and few nights
passed without a drenching shower cleansing the whole
lower portion of the island. The peak of Ljlaroma
drew to it like a magnet all the masses of moisture that
collected within many hundred miles of it; and a lit-
tle manipulation would break these up into refreshing
night showers that swept its slopes and the plateaux
and levels below; and, in order to prevent the de-
structive floods that this might produce in the rivers,
the shoulders of the mountain and its deep valleys
bristled with great forests which sponged up the falling
moisture and let it down gently from hour to hour into
the bastioned channels.

i9° Limanora

Climate was to this people as much a matter of man-
agement as food and its production. They could
modify it to fit any change in the conditions or neces-
sities or purposes of life. To be at the mercy of the
forces of nature was a state of existence in what they
now considered their barbarous past. It was only the
unforeseen that had them at a disadvantage; and the
unforeseen was to them now only the cosmic. As
the planetary system shifted through space, it had to
encounter conditions and modes and degrees of energy
and life that nothing short of omniscience could antici-
pate; but they were beginning to master the secret
of many of those unexpected changes of condition.
The astro-sciential families had been classifying for
centuries the symptoms that accompanied these in the
appearance of the sun or of one or other of the planets.
With their innumerable delicate instruments for record-
ing and analysing the electric, magnetic, luminous, and
heat- vaporous state of distant space, they could see afar
off the beginnings of cosmic disturbances and anticipate
their ultimate direction; and in many cases they could
guard Limanora against the more patent and destruc-
tive effects of magnetic and electric storms and of great
waves of heat or light.

Yet there was much to master in the new cosmic
conditions that from time to time beset the earth or the
planetary system. Some seemed to arise so suddenly
that no observation could have anticipated them. Es-
pecially was this the case with living drift, into shoals
of which the universe struck, the spawn of undeveloped
worlds. Hence came new diseases so widespread as to
be plagues. These generally evaded the fine instru-
ments of the astro-scientist, till they had reached the
very atmosphere of the earth; for in the interstellar

The Lilaran

191

spaces they led so meagre a life and were spread so
thinly and widely that they scarcely intercepted the
light or other forms of energy from the sun or other
systems. Yet the imaginative families and the inven-
tors were struggling towards some more delicate in-
strument, which would observe and record the presence
of interstellar material life.

CHAPTER XIV

CHOKTROO

THE Lilamo were usually occupied in these sanitary
duties, but at times the other section of their de-
fence of lyimanora claimed their attention. I had had
good reason to know the force of the lilaran, or storm-
cone, in my attempt to arrive in the island. Had it not
been decided to permit our entrance, our perseverance
would have failed of the attainment of our object.

I was soon to witness a marvellous display of the
defensive and repulsive powers of the storm-cone. For
some years after the first period of my novitiate and my
partial admission" to privileges as a citizen with which
this period ended, there had been observed throughout
the archipelago a movement which spread with con-
siderable rapidity. It was one of the amusements of
the Limanorans to watch the comedy of life upon the
other islands through the idrovamolan, or instrument
for distance seeing and hearing, which they had fixed
high up the mountain. On a floating strip of ire-
lium, that could be projected far into the sky, scenes
beneath the horizon could be mirrored and watched
through this instrument and through other instruments
for reducing distance. The sounds, too, that rose from
the scene re-echoed from the under-surface of the float-

192

Choktroo 193

ing mirror, and could be magnified by the makrakous-
tic part of the idrovamolan into their original volume.
A rarer and more difficult instrument was one which
combined with this power of seeing and hearing at a
great distance that of noting the magnetism working
in a community even under the horizon.

Recently they had found that they could dispense
with the floating mirror and reflector. The ether was
their transmitter of all they wished to see or hear at a
distance. Through it passed electric waves from even
immeasurable distances, whilst the sky itself formed a
sufficiently complete mirror for reflecting whatever was
occurring under the horizon. By recent discoveries
and inventions they were enabled to transform electric
impulses into the scene or sound that gave them out
into the surrounding air. Their new instruments
would tap the occurrences at any point on any given
line or in any given direction. They were now inde-
pendent of any artificial medium for their knowledge
of the outside world. The receivers of their new idro-
vamolan were every moment recording and analysing
whatsoever occurred along the line in which it was
directed; and its transformers were constantly trans-
lating the electric records into the forms or sounds
which originally sent out the impulses; it was so con-
structed as to prevent the confusion of waves that came
from different points on the route, for it moved with
the swiftness of light or, if required, with that of
electricity. These new modifications gave them hope
that they would soon be able to see and hear much
of what goes on in universes which, though invisible,
yet transmit luminous and electric waves sufficiently
strong to affect their telescopic instruments, and that
the straggling rays of light or electricity might be

i94 Limanora

transformed into the scenes and sounds which gave
them birth.

As it was, the L,imanorans were able to watch all that
was going on in the islands around them. During
their leisure hours, when it was their duty as well as
their pleasure to relax the mind, they would sit and
observe the life of what they called their menagerie.
To them, indeed, the whirling eddy of existence with
its ambitions and crimes, its luxury and misery, in the
archipelago around seemed little more than the antics
of monkeys or the internecine appetites of wild beasts.
The scenes were generally amusing in the ape-like
vanities and mimicries they exhibited. Sometimes
they were offensive and even repulsive in their filth
or brutalities. How beings formed like themselves
could endure the grossness of their luxuries and the
falsity and hollowness of their most admired social dis-
plays was to them a bewildering problem. Even the
best of these islanders were as far behind the Lima-
norans in true human qualities as they thought them-
selves in advance of apes. The daily observation of
these creatures so humanly endowed and yet so foul
and blind in act was often too much to bear for any
length of time; the most repulsive 'scenes were those
of what was considered high life, of courts and courtly
circles, of rulers and leaders of act and thought.
" Who can bear the horror of their intrigues and hypo-
crisies, their cruel trampling of the fallen, their hideous
fawning on the successful, their insolent pride and in-
tolerance of the weak ! " I often heard exclamations
like this from the lips of the watchers as they turned
away from the idrovamolan with a shudder. The
combination of ape and bully, of reptile and vapourer
was, in the thoughts of this people, the lowest depth to

Choktroo 195

which human nature could fall ; and it was the usual
and most envied form in the high social life of most of
these islands. The barbarism and ignorance of the
poor and downtrodden marked a less retrograde phase
of humanity. The sight of the posturings and scrap-
ings, the insolence and spaniel manners of the higher
classes served every day to deepen the horror of exile
and to frighten every Limanoran from anything that
would lead even to the slightest retrogression. Had it
not been for this wholesome effect upon their minds,
they would have long ago abandoned the custom of
watching this beast spectacle of retrograde and showy
civilisation, so much pain mingled with their amuse-
ment at it. They knew that their pity was vain ; for
it would take unremitting effort for thousands of years
to raise these peoples to the Limanoran level, if the
Limanoran missionaries had not in the meantime been
dragged down to the lower level ; and these thousands
of years could be better spent in attaining higher
and higher ideals in their own life. The task, they
knew, was as hopeless as if these descendants of their
degenerate exiles should attempt to drag the lower
animals up to their stage of human development, and
this irremediable nature of their state added to the pain
of the observers.

Had the habit of watching the comedy of their
menagerie been given up, the Lilamo would have still
had to observe the enactment of history in the sur-
rounding islands. It was part of their duty of defence
to anticipate all armaments against Limanora; and
they had discovered that there was unusual excitement
amongst the various peoples since the arrival of the
Daydream in their waters. It was evident that this
formed an epoch in the history of the archipelago. The

196 Limanora

L,ilamo reported the movements of the portentous
smoke-pennoned ship which sailed in the teeth of all
winds like their own ships of the air. What was to
prevent it approaching lyimanora in spite of the force
of the storm-cone? The thought brought the first
trace of fear into the breasts of this people; for, once
a foreign element had been able to force its way into
their midst, how could they prevent moral contamina-
tion and swift retrogression? Their advance would
crumble away in a few centuries, nothing but their
material progress being likely to survive the incursion
of barbarism.

It was imperative that new measures of defence be
adopted. It was then that the forces of Rimla had
been enormously increased, thus making it possible for
most of its energy to take the electric form in the storm-
cone. With this they would be able to repel the new
monster with so much metal in its bosom ; they would
play with it as with a toy on the water. All my wan-
derings had been narrowly watched, my landing in
Aleofane, my escape from it, my sojourn in Tirralaria
and ascent of Klimarol, my companionship with Sneek-
ape and my scorn of him, my sympathy with the
refugees in Nookoo, and my friendship with Noola.
Nothing escaped their attention, and my character was
analysed in the most minute way by deductions from
the details of my conduct. It was decided that, if I
showed eagerness and persistence enough, I should be
allowed to land with Noola; but that my fire-ship and
my men should be blown off from the coast.

Since then the affairs of the archipelago had been
observed as narrowly as before, and especially the
wanderings and history of the Daydream. As I ex-
pected, it passed finally into the possession of Broolyi,

Choktroo 197

and the new ideas and methods it brought into the
warfare of this isolated zone of the world made an era
in its history. A great military organiser had arisen;
and he had by the potency of his will moulded Broolyi
into a unity which with the help of new fire-ships built
on the model of my yacht had brought the other islands
into subjection. Even the aristocratic and refined
Aleofane with its subtle government and all-powerful
central institutions had to bow its neck to the yoke.
This strange romance had been enacting for more than
a decade; and the Limanorans had been watching it,
at first with amusement, and afterwards with resolution
and clear purpose. They knew the whole of this sub-
jugative process was based on hypocrisy and injustice
and bloodshed, but it was not worse than the methods
of political existence it displaced; it only meant the
substitution of one vicious ideal for others as vicious.
There would be more movement and activity for a time,
but as soon as the masterful will had vanished, there
would be a quick return to the old lazy luxury in the
few and lazy misery in the many. It had cost multi-
tudes of lives, and would cost many more before the
military mania had burned itself out ; but of what
worth were most of those lives to themselves or to the
world ? They succeeded, where they did succeed, only
in sustaining themselves wretchedly and perpetuating
a strain of existence that was, if changed at all, tending
downwards. The new spectacle was more sanguinary,
but not one whit more dismal than the ones the Ivima-
norans had witnessed for many generations. The
misery was irremediable, the standard of existence
was so low. To fence it off like a plague was all that
could be done.

When I sat down to the idrovamolan I soon dis-

198 Limanora

covered the master ot this transformation scene. I
heard in Broolyi from all the entrenched camps and
the towns loud huzzas and cries of " Long live Chok-
troo!" Turning the line of sight to the capital, the
conflagration of cries which swept the crowded streets
soon led my eye to the centre of the far-reaching mag-
netic thrill, the square of the imperial palace. There I
saw step out on a balcony and bow to the enthusiastic
populace a little firm-set figure that seemed to awaken
memories in me. I strengthened the power of vision
in order to examine the face more keenly, and, as a
great burst of " Long live our emperor! Long live
Choktroo!" kindled and blazed athwart the city, the
identity of the little conqueror broke upon my con-
sciousness.

It was my cabin-boy, Jock Drew, whom I had
rescued from a life of degradation, if not ultimate in-
famy, in his native village. His father, the local
chimney-sweep, a man of vigorous but small physique,
had succumbed to the fate of so many of his trade, and
swept his throat hourly with the fiercest of whiskey.
His mother, a brave, strong little peasant girl, had
died early of the effort to master this thirsty piece of
humanity that had been tied to her, and his vice. The
boy had the maternal lines in his nature, strong will,
great courage, and fiery passion. It stirred my pity to
see him struggle with such a mean destiny, doubtless
to sink hopelessly into the ditch. He had been shield-
ing himself from the temptation that his drunken
father set before him by living in a world of penny
romance. His imagination was strung to its highest
pitch by the gory pages of his hard-won treasures.
When he heard of my proposed expedition to the other
side of the world, he came and pleaded for even the

Choktroo 199

most menial position on board the Daydream. I was
only too eager to rescue him from the hideous fate be-
fore him, and engaged him as cabin-boy.

After he came on board, some of the men were in-
clined to patronise him, and, when he resisted their
approaches and grew sulky, to apply a rope's end to
him. I had to stand between him and them, even
though I saw that in the end he would have the best of
the quarrel; for he was strong of build and violent
in temper, and only controlled himself, I could see,
that he might have the surer and more complete re-
venge. He was a solitary, musing boy, and I thought
to draw him from his solitude by interesting him in
scientific and philosophical books; but he returned
with the greater gusto to his penny series of lives of the
great pirates, robbers, warriors, and conquerors. The
only section of the Daydream 's library which could
seduce him from his loved studies was that containing
history and adventures. The crew, as was natural,
held the studious little recluse too cheap; and occasion-
ally felt the sting of his tongue when they bantered
him; but his melodramatic manners and attitude,
copied from the coloured representations of his heroes
in his favourite series, laid him open again to their
laughter and scorn. His, mind was unwholesome
with brooding over gory achievements and tremendous
ambitions. He often uttered absurd boasts and gave
himself airs that were incongruous with his minute
figure and menial position, and Jock Drew ceased to be
the butt of the ship only when I was present ; but he
never ceased to read and meditate. The laughter of
his shipmates drove him more and more into his books
and into himself. L,ater on in the voyage he extended
his reading to books on naval architecture and the

200 Limanora

management of the steam-engine, and at last would
spend hours assisting the engineer below. He came
to know every part of the machinery and every secret
of its construction and management. Indeed, the chief
engineer acknowledged that in case of his illness he
had an able successor on board. The guns and all the
ironwork of the ship drew his attention next, and he
came to be respected for his practical knowledge of
every part; when anything needed mending, it was he
who was ultimately called in to give advice or aid.
Slowly he rose to be the real master of the Daydream,
even though he continued to be laughed at for his hero-
mimic airs and his occasional boasts. He had by his
reading and studies made himself essential to every
man on board, and his strong will exacted outward
respect, if not obedience to him, in return. It was
strange to see the revolution in the ship's crew during
their voyaging about the archipelago. When I came
on board again, I saw that, though they continued a
semblance of their old bantering, they had in their
hearts begun to bow before the boy of twenty. The
very gall of their scorn and of his menial position had
driven him into this slow but striking revolt.

And here I saw the result. His boyhood, neglected
and beaten, had given the cunning and worldly wisdom
and concentration of power that belong in most to late
maturity. The strength that had lain dormant for so
many centuries in his mother's peasant race had
gathered in him like a torrent. The hard conditions
of his youth had reined iri the wildness and animality
which had run riot in his father's debauchery. Hun-
dreds of such masterful natures, finding no sphere in
their native locality to give scope to the long-dammed-
up powers of their race, waste themselves in chafing

Choktroo 201

against their petty surroundings and die with the
reputation of miniature devils. The focussed energy
of two long-suppressed races had in this case found its
career and scope, and a diabolic conflagration was the
consequence in this isolated region of the world. The
race of Jock Drew had never before blossomed; now
that it had found the fit soil, it had flowered porten-
tously.

The misfortune was that his ill-moulded youth
and his favourite reading had left him naked of moral-
ity. He was not in this respect much worse than the
people whom he misled into war or than those whom
he subjugated. He had only more concentrated will
and energy and a keener appreciation of the means
that would best satisfy his appetite for power. The
complete suppression of the desire through thousands
of years of his peasant ancestry made its ultimate man-
ifestation on finding freedom of action all the more
tremendous. It grew with growing self-confidence;
and confidence grew with success. His bearing wholly
altered during the wanderings of the Daydream before
I had abandoned her. He had grown erect and threw
his great chest out and held his large head up till he
overawed his persecutors. Seeing him only in a sitting
position or looking only at his bust one would have
guessed him to be of lofty stature. Yet like his father
and mother he never rose above five feet in height;
and as his face filled up with good fare and the know-
ledge of his own powers it grew handsome and calm,
seldom showing the fierce brute slumbering under-
neath. His wonderful self-control and reserve held
him silent in circumstances where speech or action
would have revealed his innate folly or animality, and
he learned the power of such reserve, allied with

202 Limanora

sudden and decisive action, over the wills of others; he
saw that it throws an air of mystery round the indi-
viduality. So he refrained from action till he had com-
plete control of the circumstances and had gathered
such resources into his hands as would astonish his
rivals or enemies; silently, unscrupulously, he got to
know the cards they held in their hands, whilst he con-
cealed his own under seeming inaction; then with a
sudden and unnerving move he threw all his forces
upon them and demoralised them. I had watched the
method in the little intrigues and conspiracies on ship-
board, and I knew when I observed him through the
idrovamolan that he was the same Jock Drew, only
more developed by his astonishing successes.

He had found his opportunity when the Daydream
finally anchored in the chief harbour of Broolyi.
There was much need of government after the plague;
the monarch and his family had fled and finally per-
ished; and the two rivals for the position were almost
equally matched. There was prospect of a long civil
war. The wiser and stronger counsellors set up a
republic, but this was only a feeble stop-gap. The
flames of civil war burst out in spite of it.

Jock arrived at this stage of their history, and joined
the staff of the competitor for the throne who held the
capital and the key of the public treasury. He rapidly
became prime adviser in the camp, and as soon as he
had attracted confidence in himself and his character
he set his method to work. He led an army out to
attack the enemy, and completely routed them by the
suddenness of his action; he had led one half of his
troops straight out to meet the forces opposed to him,
but he had sent the others round by a secret path into
their rear, and they burst simultaneously upon the

Choktroo 203

enemy. The surprise broke the spirit of the attacked
and they fled in rout.

With wily stratagem he incited other officers to rival
him, and took care that they went out under disad-
vantageous conditions. They failed, and their failures
led to loud demands for Choktroo, as he came to be
called. He now got command of the whole of the re-
sources of the state, and used them for the making of
guns and other surprises for the enemy. Meanwhile he
allowed the enemy to think that his party was wholly
demoralised by defeats, and they crept up towards the
walls of the city in their excess of confidence. He knew
by his spies in their camp how vainglorious they had
become; but he allowed their bravado to rise to the
pitch of fool hardiness, and then, his preparations being
made, he opened fire upon them, from all sides. So com-
plete was the rout, that the enemy disappeared from
the country around and took refuge in distant castles
and forts.

His name grew into a power of itself, rousing enthu-
siasm wherever he appeared and greatly terrifying
his opponents. It was then that there began the
most striking part of his career. All the brave and
able generals who during the civil war had come up
from the ranks were completely in his power. He
sent them out to master castles or detachments of the
enemy, but with such imperfect forces or supplies as
would render them inactive. Their individual talents
snatched occasional small victories, but as a rule they
only prepared for ultimate victory by raising entrench-
ments and scouring the country around. Whenever
he discovered that in any part a general was about to
be successful in spite of his disadvantages, he hurried
thither and led the troops to victory. If the feebleness

204 Limanora

of an officer anywhere seemed about to ensure defeat
he marched reinforcements to his aid and turned it into
success. Whenever he suffered defeat himself, he
always managed to represent it as a brilliant success
marred by the incompetence of some other general.
At last he grew weary of the guerrilla warfare and re-
solved that it should end. So he withdrew his troops
from siege- work and allowed the rebels to gather con-
fidence and to mass again. He sent several generals
against them with small armies. Their defeats gave
the enemy still greater boldness. They ventured
nearer to the capital; and when they were defiling
through a pass he appeared on the heights with his
guns. The two sections of his army closed the mouths
of the pass, and the finest array the rebels had ever
shown was shattered. The castles and forts soon sur-
rendered. With one acclaim Choktroo was elected
emperor, and the candidate whom he was supposed to
be helping vanished from the scene.

His boyish reading had made him as much of an
actor as he was by nature an organiser. Before long
the whole people of Broolyi were adoring him as a god.
Their passion was glory; and in him they had found
the incarnation of glory. No piece of work in the state
so minute but, if successful, he claimed as his own, even
should it have been centuries old. No act of his own
but, if unsuccessful, he found a scapegoat for. He was
mean enough to steal and eavesdrop in his own house-
hold; he was bold enough to outlie the foulest of his
minions, to outface the most manifest exposure of his
crimes. He even dared to assume the r61e of divinity.
He ringed himself round with mystery and ceremonial,
and when he did appear in public made the appear-
ance impressive by its display. He knew the effect of

Choktroo 205

silence, and cheapened neither himself nor his words.
He organised the state on military lines and made it
centre in his personality.

He soon had exhausted the treasury and the resources
of the country in the civil war and in his public dis-
plays. Nor could he keep up his glory long in in-
action, even though it was an inaction of mystery. He
must soon go to war beyond the bounds of the island.
There he could shine, there he could get all the sup-
plies he needed; but he had to keep up the farce the
nation had played for centuries of professing to keep
the peace, for he had adopted the title of the Prince
of Peace. He had to make it appear that his wars
were forced on him by his neighbours, and for this
invented an elaborate system of diplomacies which
enabled him to pick a quarrel and yet seem to have it
thrust upon him.

His first quarry was Aleofane; for it was the wealth-
iest island in the archipelago. For years he kept up a
show of alliance with it, till he had his fire-ships ready,
built under his direction on the model of the Daydream.
He racked his dominion to make guns and all kinds of
firearms. When the expedition was complete, he made
a demand of Aleofane that had show of reason and yet
could not be complied with. It was refused, and his
fleet was outside the capital before it could make prepa-
ration. He sent some of his ships to the other side of
the island to land troops, and as these marched up by
land he disembarked the rest under protection of his
guns. The first battle decided the war. He dethroned
the monarch of Aleofane and annexed the island to
his dominions, setting up a viceroy, with a strong force
to support him.

He drew new troops from the ranks of the people for

206 Limanora

service in other islands. He impoverished those nobles
who refused to join his court or his staff. He broke
the spirit of all who would not adore him, and he
drained by taxation the resources of the country.

With still larger armies and larger fleets he swept
conquering over the whole archipelago, till every
people bowed before him. Those who distinguished
themselves in his wars or in his service he elevated to
new distinctions and titles. Those who died in his
wars he beatified. With great ceremony he would
raise all the dead on one of his battle-fields to the rank
of sub-divinities, till his heaven was as crowded as his
court. He did not obliterate the old religions; but he
overshadowed them, and his policy kept subject to
him the passion for glory in life and deification after
death that lurks in every human bosom. The active
and the romantic were strung up to enthusiasm by the
magnetism of his name. Most thought it was his per-
sonality which set their blood throbbing, but it was
only that his deeds and his histrionic power of magni-
fying them worked on their imaginations. How wild
their fervour I could scarcely have realised had I not
observed it with my own senses.

He had to keep moving and victoriously moving
if his magnetism were not to vanish. When his em-
pire included all the islands in the archipelago but the
Isle of Devils in the centre, there was nothing for it but
to attempt its conquest. We heard him bluster out
his favourite bombastic phrases, learned from his penny
romances and biographies. " Heaven is our ally, and
who on earth can stand against us? Is it not our
mission, the mission of a god, to chase all devils from
the earth ? Our last conquest shall be hell, and its
denizens shall die by fire and sword." Utterances and

Choktroo 207

proclamations like this fired the imaginations of his
soldiers, and they would have laid their lives down at
the moment for this fire-eater. What he had boasted
or threatened before, he had done, or had by astute
fiction persuaded his followers that he had done; and
what limit was there to his deeds ? If he said that he
would scale the heavens, they were certain he would
do it. The thought fused them into a unity and
chased out of their breasts the panic which the mere
mention of the central isle produced.

He had not the traditional and hereditary ague-fit to
overcome in his blood, yet there was a new sinking of
the heart when he thought of his task. He had to
reassure himself by wild rhodomontade, as he superin-
tended the building and armament of an enormous
fleet and the concentration of the largest army the
archipelago had ever seen. He could not pick a diplo-
matic quarrel with his new victim; yet he must have
at least the semblance of a cause in order to put heart
into his followers. He announced that he had sent
envoys to the Isle of Devils to open intercourse with it,
but they were not allowed to approach. Again and
again had he tried this pacific measure, but no heed
had been given to him. I,et vengeance be upon the
heads of so churlish and unjust a people! How could
such poltroons and men-haters be allowed to cumber
the earth ?

I watched the great fleet put out from Broolyi with
its streamers of smoke. We could have heard the ac-
clamations almost with the unaided ear; they rent the
sky when Choktroo went on board his own fire-ship,
which was thrice the size of the largest of the others,
and thrice more brilliantly caparisoned. He passed
with his favourite silent and self-absorbed look on his

2o8 Limanora

face through the applauding crowds on to a raised
platform in the stern, reserved for him and his staff.
Arrived there he paced silently with his chin resting
on his folded arms. He knew what an impression of
godlikeness this made on the crowd. Small though he
was in stature, he doubtless seemed to his followers and
the people on the shore to take gigantic proportions.

I was amazed to see so little perturbation amongst the
Limanorans. They seemed to watch the whole scene
as if it were a comedy. On the fleet steamed, and yet
there was perfect calm in the community; only the
Lilamo were at their posts on the peak of L,ilarorna.
The rest were peacefully seated at the idrovamolans or
busy with their usual avocations. I knew the destruc-
tiveness of the great cannon that Choktroo had pre-
pared, and the distance they would carry. On this
point indeed I had been consulted some months before.
I knew, too, how this people shrank from every act that
would involve the loss of a human life. How were
they to repel this great armament without whelming
it in the ocean and drowning a large proportion of
those in the ships? Thyriel could throw no light on
the problem; we were both too young to be taken into
the confidence of the wise men or to know their designs.
I could do nothing but watch the fleet and then pass
to my daily duties.

A night passed, and at dawn we could see the islands
of smoke lie black on the horizon; the ships themselves
had not appeared. Choktroo evidently knew that it
was useless to conceal the expedition or its object from
this far-seeing people under the darkness of night. It
was too well known throughout the archipelago how
penetrative was their gaze. He meant to make his
attack by day. Soon the funnels and the masts broke

Choktroo 209

the sky-line. Yet there was not a sound from the
storm-cone. The slight wind had fallen; everything
favoured the invader. He could see through the trans-
lucent air every feature of our island and almost every
movement of its inhabitants as soon as we could dis-
cern the human beings on board his ships with the
naked eye. Were they getting drawn into some gigan-
tic trap? This thought evidently occurred to the
leader of the armament, as it occurred to me, for the
fleet lessened speed. I could see Choktroo, at a loss
what to do, on his poop consulting with his officers,
who could help him little. Still the storm-cone stood
silent on the mountain-peak.

The bold.step had to be taken; the order was given
for advance. The smoke again streamed in the rear of
the fleet, and I could see the gunners prepare for
action and the sailors and soldiers set the boats ready
for launching. What had happened to the Lilamo ?
Were they all asleep ? Was the progress of the island
at last to be trampled under the feet of this brutal
soldier and his forces? The fire-ships were almost
within cannon-shot of the shore; there puffed out the
preliminary whiff from the side of Choktroo' s steamer
and the ball fell with a roar into the ocean between.
Another five minutes and matters would be past
remedy. Yet there was perfect calm among the Lima-
norans. I controlled my excitement and watched the
fleet. Everything was bustle on board, and when I
sat down to the idrovamolan all sounds were jubilant
and boasting. This Isle of Devils was at last to have
her master. This proud isolation was at last to be
broken. Such exclamations I could hear from the
gunners as they loaded and ran out their guns.

All was silence, for all was ready for the word of

210 Limanora

command. Choktroo paced his poop in scarce-con-
trollable glee. His thoughts were doubtless stretching
out beyond the fog circle to the countries he had left
behind him with his boyhood, other worlds for him to
conquer. His arms were folded and his eye was turned
inward; he knew that the whole expedition was await-
ing his nod. Soon he stopped stone-silent and stiff, as
if to give the decisive word. I waited the action, but
he still stood moveless. I looked over the ship; there
was his staff awaiting his beck as if petrified. Every
man was at his post, but not a muscle moved; the eyes
stared as if they belonged to the dead. My glance
took in the other ships; all were as silent and still as
the grave. The whole armament seemed^ turned to
stone.

Then there fluttered down upon the vessels human
figures that I recognised as of the Lilamo. In a mo-
ment a Limanoran pilot stood at the helm of each fire-
ship; and as if by nature the whole fleet turned
majestically round and made for the shelving beach of
a low uninhabited island underneath the horizon. On
and on they sped straight for the shore, round whose
margin not the least fringe of surf whitened. Through
the idrovamolan I could hear the grating keels as they
struck the sand and pebbles at full speed. The crash
seemed to awaken the crews and the soldiers, who
rubbed their eyes as if roused from a dream. Before
them the bows of their ships were burrowing themselves
in the .blown sand of the beach; but already I could
see the pilots winging their way through the sky back
to lyimanora.

There was a silent power in the lilaran which I had
not investigated: its power of magnetism. This it
could exercise several miles off; but it grew feebler

Choktroo 2 1 1

with the distance. In this aspect, then, the lilaran
could not be used as a weapon of defence far from the
shore of Limanora. If, however, there was a mass of
iron or like magnetisable metal in the ship that con-
tained its victims, its power had been discovered to be
as great far as near. It was only recently that they
had so far developed their personal power of arresting
the consciousness by sudden sleep-petrifaction as to be
able to exercise it at a distance. This they accom-
plished by material aids to the magnetic faculty. The
sudden flashing of brilliant objects before the eyes and
the use of powerful magnets had been found to inten-
sify the somnifractive power of the eye and the mag-
netic sense. This led them to make experiments with
the concentrated power of magnets all brilliant with
irelium jewels. The result was that they found the
somnifractive power to reside even more in things than
in persons. They tried it through the lilaran on L,ima-
norans of the most powerful will at the farthest corner
of the island, and found it to be the more effective the
more power they concentrated and the more iron or
metals of similar quality were near the patient.

This result had been reached about the time they had
come to see that the invasion of their island by Chok-
troo was inevitable without some other than the mere
wind-power of the lilaran. Step by step the L,ilamo
brought their new weapon to perfection; at any mo-
ment they could concentrate the forces of Rimla into
this faculty of the lilaran. They experimented on
Limanorans in boats out at sea, and finally could tabu-
late the magnetic powers at various distances. This
explained to me the flashings I had often seen on the
horizon and had taken for an effect of the idrovamolan ;
but they were too near the surface of the sea for that.

2 1 2 Limanora

This explained the perfect calm with which the Lima-
norans watched the approach of Choktroo's expedition
and the thrilling keenness of the flashes that swept
over his fire-ships.

I watched for many days the effect of this great blow
upon the nature and fortunes of my old cabin-boy.
Over his immediate staff and army he was able to
regain his full sway as soon as they recovered from the
shock; but his power over the other islanders was
completely shaken. Bodies of them launched the boats
from the steamers and made off for their own islands
before the leaders were aware of their intentions. The
moment Choktroo realised the position he turned his
still uninjured guns in the direction of the sea and
commanded all issue from the beach where his ships
were buried. For wholesome example he sank several
boats which had almost got out of his reach. Then
he set his army to dig canals around one of his fire-
ships; but no sooner was she ready for floating than
the whole force of the lilaran was turned in her direc-
tion; the waves rose and a single night's surf com-
pletely undid the labour of days. The ship was as
deeply embedded as ever; and her sisters had almost
disappeared beneath the sand-dunes. The weight of
metal in them shortened the process of burial.

It was clear that nothing could be done to save the
expedition or bring its material back to Broolyi. Be-
fore many days we saw the soldiers embark somewhat
sadly in the boats and find their way across the ocean
to the adjacent islands. Piecemeal the whole army
retraced its steps to Broolyi.

It was not likely that Choktroo would allow this slur
to rest on his fame and eat into his power like rust, for
there was clear evidence that his influence over even

Choktroo 213

the Broolyians had greatly suffered. By means of his
advertising and his histrionic abilities he had brought
them to believe that he was invincible; they now began
to feel that he had the same limitations as themselves:
he was powerless against the magic of the Isle of Devils.
All his wiles were needed to check the spread of panic
and distrust. He first of all minimised the defeat in
his proclamations, and before many months were over
he had come to speak of it as a victory marred by the
invincible powers of nature. He had been quick to
recognise the similarity of the phenomenon to that
we had experienced in the Daydream when running the
gauntlet of the fog circle, and he sent out party after
party to explore the ring of mystery and to come back
with tales of its magical powers of inducing sleep.
Thus was he soon able to convince the archipelago that
the failure of his great expedition was due, not to the
inhabitants of the Isle of Devils, but to the forces of
nature. He had in his own eye and will great mes-
meric power, and by practice was able to develop it
into something that he could exercise at pleasure.
Then he made public exhibition of his capacity in the
various islands. He threw numbers into mesmeric
sleep, nor would he or could he release them from its
thrall. They became his willing slaves and lived only
to please him. A milder form of mesmeric fascination
he used in order to rivet his despotism on his armies.
He would address sections of them with bombastic self-
glorification of his deeds and powers and with flatteries
of them and their glorious courage. His personal
magnetism worked upon them as they gazed at him,
and by the close of his speech he had them enthralled
to his will.

It was not long before he was feared as a magician

214 Limanora

by all who did not mesmerically worship'him; and tens
of thousands were eager to do the most wicked and
shameful deeds, if only he bade them. Yet he dared
not shrink from another fall with the inhabitants of the
Isle of Devils; else even this preternatural fascination
that he exercised might vanish. For years he racked
the wealth of the islands and built an enormous fleet of
still more powerful fire-ships, and armed it with still
more powerful guns. To supply the funds for the ex-
pedition, those who were not trained fighting men be-
came slaves, who toiled for him all but their few hours
of sleep. Rebellion against this galling and impover-
ishing despotism was slowly forming in the breasts of
the people. Many of them were disappearing myster-
iously. They had betaken themselves to unapproach-
able caverns like Nookoo, and my dreamer of Swoonarie
was arming them with his plague-pellets. A few more
months and revolution would have broken out against
the despot, and he at least would have perished ; but
the expedition sailed in all its pomp, again deeply im-
pressing the imaginations of the islanders. This time
he had taken precautions against the somnifaction of
his army by means of a sleep-expelling drug. Every
man was furnished with a dose of it to take as soon as
they came near the dreaded isle. The L,ilamo had
been busy for some time, I had seen; but the I,ima-
norans were as unconcerned at this approach as at the
former one. What new defence had they ? I could see
no more preparation than there had been on the pre-
vious occasion. The calm which prevailed reassured
me; yet soon I grew restless with the fear that this fire-
eating cabin-boy with the mystery in his eyes would
sully the shores of L,imanora with his vulgar ambitions.
My fear became alarm as I saw on the horizon the

Choktroo 2 1 5

smoke of the fleet and heard through the idrovamolan
the shout of triumph rise from the army when the peak
of lyilaroma had burst on their view. I could see each
man drink his drug; and I thought that all was lost.
Suddenly there came a roar from every ship; and I
could see that it accompanied a plume of steam that
escaped from the sides. The boiler of every fire-ship
had evidently been punctured; and soon I could see
that it cost those on board unceasing effort to keep
afloat. The soldiers were about to take to the boats
when a deeper-mouthed roar numbed every other
sound. It was the lilaran at work, and the whole fleet
soon vanished over the horizon before its compulsive
blast.

The puncturing had been accomplished by submarine
action. The Lilamo had sent through the waters their
floating batteries, which by nicely adjusted weights lay
beneath the surface right on the track of the fleet.
The electric cables by which they were secured could
shift them hither and thither; and through them im-
mense force could be applied, sending a volley of keen
darts up towards whatever iron there was above them.
These darts had entered the hulls of the ships just be-
neath the water-line and made their way into the iron
of the engines; one or other told on the boilers and
disabled the ships. The electric floats were unseen by
the expedition, and the wounding of the fleet was as
mysterious and magical as the sleep had been on the
previous attempt. Panic seized on every soldier and
sailor, and they thanked their gods when the blast of
the lilaran hurried them to the shelving beach of a low
island and they heard the keels grate on shingle and
sand. They scrambled on shore through the surf and
found shelter from the wind behind the mounds that

216 Limanora

covered the former fleet or under their gaunt ribs or
sides.

But a new panic overcame them when they dis-
covered that their leader was gone and could nowhere
be found. Then it was remembered that in the worst
of the storm which blew from Lilaroma a giant bird
had swooped down towards his ship and rested for a
moment on the platform, where he stood in solitary
meditation, and as suddenly soared up again. It was
two messengers of the Lilamo who had been sent in
one of their bird-shaped air-ships to make an end
of these warlike expeditions. They had alighted be-
side Choktroo, and by the powerful means they com-
manded had sent him into a deep sleep in spite of his
drug; they tossed him into their air-ship and in a few
moments were high in the azure rushing before the
blast of the lilaran. Away they fled with him all day
and all night across the belt of fog, and having reached
the outer world they let him down still tranced on the
shore of a lonely coral islet of the Pacific close to a
group inhabited by a savage and warlike tribe.
Choktroo had their instincts and ambitions; let him
master the savages when he awakened. A wild beast
could do no harm amongst wild beasts.

His memory and example haunted the archipelago
like an evil dream for generations. Some thought that
he had been borne aloft to heaven by a messenger of
the gods, and worshipped him as divine; his cruel
tyranny and wars goaded on his worshippers to wild
fury of injustice and slaughter. Others who were
keener of brain and had perceived the earthly character
of their leader and his purposes were incited to like
ambitions. The romance of his life was glorified in
verse and prose by every new school of literature and

Choktroo 2 1 7

fired the imaginations of boyhood to warlike exploits.
War, piracy, plunder came to be the favourite forms
of dishonesty in the archipelago. It was marvellous
how much the peaceful and obscure suffered from the
romance of this cabin-boy's adventures.

But no man of the islands dared again to approach
the Isle of Devils. Even he whom so many of them
reputed a god had been unable to break in; and the
mishap to. the last fleet had been more bewildering
than that to the first. Magical powers were possessed
by the inhabitants of this island without a doubt;
there seemed to be no limit to their transcendence of
the order of nature. Evil they were, and the fear of
them the Broolyians had to endure in patience. Nor
did it grow less from generation to generation. Fancy
never let the stories of the defeat of the great Choktroo
rest; they gathered to them features more and more
terrible to contemplate. A halo of dread and mystery
is far more effective as a ferice against human intru-
sion than a halo of sanctity or even divinity. It cows
the miscreant and the brute in the human breast. The
duties of the Lilamo in repelling the attacks of men
would vanish for hundreds of generations.

For Choktroo, his fate was a romantic contrast to
that of his fame. Reports were brought in by the
idrovamolan or by flying messengers who had ventured
over the belt of fog. He was rescued by the neigh-
bouring tribe before he starved on the barren islet,
only to be threatened with sacrifice to one of their
gods. A missionary who had some influence over the
heathen arrived at the moment of sacrifice and saved
him. After learning their language he worked his
way by intrigues and assassinations and what they
thought magic up to the headship of the tribe. When

2i8 Limanora

he had made himself secure in his power over them, he
built a great fleet of war-canoes, and, after mastering
the groups of islands within range and enlisting their
warriors and canoes in his service, he set sail southward
for some land they knew not of. South and then east
the fleet made way, his followers still unalarmed. At
last appeared the circle of mystery on the horizon. He
gave the word to row forward into it; but, before the
command had reached the outermost of the-canoes, he
was hurled from his platform into the sea, and, as he
rose to the surface, he was promptly speared by his
own immediate staff. Round swung the heads of the
canoes by one simultaneous impulse. Their chief had
become a madman to think of entering that belt of
mystery; and away they paddled for very life; nor
did they cease their frantic efforts till the dark cloud
had sunk beneath the horizon.

CHAPTER XV

THE DUOMOVAMOLAN OR COSMOPHONK

THOUGH the Limanorans calmly pursued their
regular employments during these attempts at
invasion, I had myself felt the uneasy spiritual atrno-
. sphere that precedes and presages turmoil. None but
the lyilamo were engaged in preparation for defence;
yet during all the years every spirit was tense and
giving out its energy in sympathy to this section of the
people. There was a palpable loss of nervous power in
the community, for they knew that by accident some
joint in the arrangements might fail to work and all the
defence miscarry. Not till the bold disturber of their
progress was finally disposed of did the tension or the
leakage of nerve- energy cease. To be absorbed in mere
war was to them the hades of human society, and to
have again sealed up their island from the intrusion of
degenerate souls was a happy epoch in their history.

While the whole community quivered with inward
jubilance, two momentary dangers threatened it: it
might take some time to recover its equilibrium; and
its thoughts and interests, narrowed by the necessity
of defence against this threat from below, might be
long in rising to the true cosmic level. Some excep-
tional stimulus was needed to raise their lives and

219

220 Limanora

aims, some appeal to the spirit, which would set them
free from the trammels of earth and all deteriorative
excitement. Such liberation had been by no means
uncommon in their past, but no occasion for it had
occurred since I had entered on my novitiate, except
in the case of individuals and families; then I had
been too busy with my training or too distant from the
household concerned to notice it.

Now it was to be a national purification of the nature,
and I was to share in it. Would this be a religious
ceremony, a day of humiliation and prayer, such as I
had often witnessed in my old home after great national
disasters or during plague or famine? I had seen no
churches or temples, no signs of religious service, no
acts of private worship. I had never heard anyone
speak of gods or priests or expiations. Was this at
last to be the revelation of the inner shrine, into which
I had never been able to penetrate ?

I had not long to wait for the solution of my prob-
lems. Purposes here moved to conclusions with light-
ning swiftness, and when one impulse stirred the
people, there was needed no heralding to mass them
in the desired place. I found myself drawn with my
proparents and Thyriel and her household towards a
massive building that stood upon a peak far up the
slopes of Ularoma. There was no need of road or
steps to it; wings made the wide air the highway.
Yet were there great terraces ramparting the sides of
the peak, and from the highest seawards there was a
marvellous flight of steps which, when the clouds hid
L,ilaroma, seemed to lead up into heaven. I had often
seen the edifice gleam high in the setting sun, yet there
were so many temple-like structures on the shoulders
and peaks of the giant mountain that it had ceased to

The Duomovamolan 221

excite inquiry. Now as we flew towards it its titanic
proportions and jewelled beauty seemed to dominate
all the lower world. The building, the most striking
that I had ever seen, raised an enormous circular dome
of crystal to the sky, and around this were innumerable
smaller structures, which elsewhere would have bulked
huge to the eye. As we drew nearer, I saw that each
crystal cupola, instead of crouching low upon the ter-
race as I had thought at first, rose upon a lofty and
massive tower of great strength. What I had taken
for smaller and higher terraces and bastions were the
walls of towers and square citadels that seemed built
to outlast the wars of Titans. Solid lava they were of
extraordinary thickness. There was nothing here of
that slenderness and delicacy which had made me com-
pare their other buildings to lace-work. The terraces
and flight of steps I had seen from below were but the
outer flanks of the layer on layer of foundations laid
upon the plateau to save the structure from all but the
deepest-sourced tremors.

As we entered the mighty portal, I felt that no
storm or earthquake could move it. It seemed a city
sculptured out of the solid rock; but, as soon as we
were in, the sense of this massiveness vanished and the
whole appeared as we looked up fairy-like and gossa-
mer. In any one of the vast temples nothing but a
film seemed to separate us from the azure sky. In the
smaller towers we gazed up a dark shaft roofed by a
circle of sky, and the very stars shone out upon our
vision by day, so palpable was the column of darkness
above us.

We soon settled in our hanging rests under the great
central dome. Around us were thousands hung in
mid-air in different attitudes of rest. Yet the building

222 Limanora

sounded empty, so vast was it and so silent were all.
The slightest whisper rang across its great untram-
melled spaces with the sharpness of a word beside us.
Not a column or beam or ornament broke the harmon-
ious simplicity of the spacious circle from vault to floor,
from side to side. Everyone by instinct kept still; for
the mere rustle of a wing appalled by its far-reaching
effect. We even held our breath lest the sound should
break the colossal stillness. To me it seemed for a
time frozen silence.

I soon perceived that there was no effort in the self-
repression of my neighbours' movements. They were
entranced, their heads erect as if catching the echo of
some far-ofif music. To me there was as deep stillness
as before. I listened intently, but felt no change ex-
cept a slight exhilaration; an electric influence was
pulsing around. To the electric sense in them some
great harmony was appealing. Yet there was more
than this; for their eyes were fixed intently on the
dome. I looked up and felt awestruck. There on a
scale that seemed to match the sky of night I saw
enacting the evolution of a universe. In the blue vault
a great sphere of glowing vapour was whirling round;
from it sprang off huge concentric rings, that one after
the other, themselves became whirling spheres ablaze
with the intensity of white heat. Step by step a system
of earths revolving round a central sun was developed.
On one as it cooled we could see life appear and grow
varied, then fade away and finally vanish. Before the
last tragedy had closed, another had taken up the
strain of existence, had run its course upon the globe,
and a third had stepped into the ranks of life-bearers.
The torch of generation was passed on from orbit to
orbit, the central luminary ever dimming its fires., till

The Duomovamolan 223

at last the system wheeled on through darkness, seem-
ing to have no purpose in the universe; but just as
the last light flickered and began to vanish from the
surface of the sun, out of the darkness seemed to rush
another dead universe ; through the eternities the two
had been approaching nearer and nearer, drawn by
their common doom. In a moment they had crashed
together and out of the collision came a mist of fire,
that soon by whirling in space became again another
and a larger sphere of glowing vapour.

How impressive was this reincarnation of worlds!
Deeper and deeper the scene sank into the spirit, as
the electric thrill which accompanied the earlier steps
of the process passed into dim-echoing music, translat-
ing all we saw into sounds. A singular feature of their
music was that it was never produced in the same room
in which it was to be listened to. The machinery and
the orchestra drown by their clack and clamour the
soft footfalls of harmony that are the only true spirit
of music; this was their reason. They had a contriv-
ance in every large room, a huge-mouthed tube by
which inflowing music was softened or strengthened
and which could if need be raise a whisper into a
thunder-peal ; in this was a series of keys or stops, by
which any sound coming through it could be modu-
lated. One key could make the apparatus sound-
proof by filling its throat with a pledget of a peculiar
fibrous metal they had. One series could wring out
the harshness of any sound till it became soft as a
much-reverberated echo. A second magnified any
sound, however soft, to the required loudness and vol-
ume, and the whole was controlled by a minute key-
board which could be held in the hand and moved to
any part of the room.

224 Limanora

In this vast auditorium I could not see where the
key-board was managed; but he must have been a
poet-musician who manipulated it, so delicately did the
volume of sound adapt itself to the mood of those who
watched the growth and decay of worlds. Now it
swelled with the collision into thunderous harmony;
again as a crisis approached in the tragedy it fell to the
low music of far-echoing nature-sounds. At times this
marvellous opera of universes died away to my hear-
ing; yet my neighbours lay in trance as if still catching
harmonies that mastered the soul. I knew nothing but
the vague electric thrill that passes through the nature
at some great thought. Harmonies as colossal touched
their electric sense as those which before had come
through their hearing. I longed to follow them into
those spheres of melodious being that were still beyond
me.

I came afterwards to know the astronomic family that
had arranged these wonderful effects upon the soul
through the various senses, and I saw the mechanism
by which they were contrived. Its simplicity was what
struck me most, when I remembered how complicated
were the sensuous modes of appeal to the spirit. Out
of innumerable sonoscripts and electrographs impressed
by the world of stars upon their records, they had
selected those that would fit together and raise the
souls of the listeners to the sublimity of seeing the
infinite cosmos.

This daylight representation of the music of the
spheres was but a prelude to a more impressive effect
as night fell. By some ingenious mechanism the im-
mense dome was changed; instead of a semi-opaque
crystal, on which could be enacted a mimic evolution
of systems, there slid into its place an enormous lens,

The Duomovamolan 225

which gathered the sky ten thousand thousand times
magnified into the focus of a smaller lens; and upon
this was turned another magnifier, which threw upon
some light-bearing film in front of us a picture of the
sky a million million times the size of what appeared to
the unaided eye. Here we saw enacting the infinite
tragedy of the cosmos. We could turn aside and view
the azure above us strewn with its silver eyes, and the
contrast raised the soul to unknown heights of sub-
limity. In the picture the worlds lived and moved,
and the number of those that filled the spaces behind
was past all counting; we seemed to have drawn as
near to some of the golden centres of systems as light-
ning flight from the beginning of our earth would have
brought us.

And what gave transcendent sublimity to the scene
was the strange music that accompanied it. By means
of the duotnovamolan, a marvellous instrument which
reversed the processes of Oolorefa, we heard the har-
mony that the worlds made in their motions. As they
moved across our lens and round and across one another,
their movements, enormously magnified, awakened
such harmony of sounds as never embodied soul had
heard. Their flight and their magnetism affected an
irelium film in such a way that the complicated lines
and curves and figures produced upon it translated
themselves into the music which would have produced
these figures in the ooloran. This people had long
practised architecture by music in Oolorefa before they
thought of attempting the reverse process and convert-
ing form and colour into melody; but once thought
of, it was soon accomplished, and the oorolan was the
result. The shadowy figures which any melody pro-
duced could be made themselves to reproduce it.

226 Limanora

From the use of this little instrument it came to be
seen that their telescopes could by a little modifica-
tion and addition be made to tell out in music the
scenes they witnessed and recorded. Step by step the
astronomic families advanced till at last they reached
the wonderful duomovamolan, or cosmophone, which,
facing the heavens unbrokenly for generations, stored
up the music of the spheres in their various changes.
It was this instrument we heard as we gazed into the
hitherto unfathomed depths of night. The worlds
themselves in their motion played upon it, and through
it upon our souls. No human thought could have con-
ceived the marvels of harmony that rang through the
great auditorium. We felt as if we had been present at
the creation of the universe and our thoughts ranged
through infinite space. A dream of the most tremen-
dous kind was being enacted before our waking senses.
How poor seemed the whole long history of life upon
our earth ! Thought was the only element in us akin
with infinity or like to last through eternity, the
thought that could thus span the abysses between the
systems of worlds and comprehend these cosmic melo-
dies still ringing in our ears.

When the treasured- up music of the spheric move-
ments of the past ceased, the night itself, the very sky
we were contemplating began to stir fresh harmonies
through the lenses of the subsidiary towers. We
gazed, and the stars in their silver motions, motions
unnoticed by the naked eye, told their tale in sweet
harmony. These new symphonies were simpler than
the operas of creation and decadence that we had been
listening to and, after those titanic effects, seemed
almost monotonous, so few complications had they.
They soothed the souls lost in the sublimities of in-

The Duomovamolan 227

finite space and time and we came gentlier down to
the earth on which our life was cast. We still trod
on air, our heads were still amongst the stars, but the
earth was near us and counted as one of the myriad
worlds.

As night swung towards the mid-vault, the music
faded and seemed to sound from far valleys. At last it
sank into a lullaby, the lullaby of slow-moving constel-
lations. Sleep came on me by unconscious, scarce-
heard footfalls, and through its magic portal the uni-
verse of dreams appeared. Amongst the stars I flew,
never-resting, eager to visit and know all. Here I
communed with beings so like me and yet so far above
me that I yearned to remain with them; but on I had
to speed. Then I rested on a world still dominated by
the rudimentary stages of life-energy, and so repulsive
were the sights and sounds there that I fled shrieking
from it. Next came a sphere so filmy and translucent
I scarcely knew how it persisted in tiding the storms
of space; yet here, too, was life, life so noble, so im-
material, that I felt ashamed of my body and its sensu-
ous methods of knowledge; so ethereal were the beings
there that the common forces of gravitation and attrac-
tion seemed to have no power over them; so far below
them did I feel myself to be in the process of evolution
that I had not the heart to remain. Away into space
I winged, till a dark orb drew me towards it, shone on
by suns of the most fantastic and ill-omened colours.
Here, too, was a manhood not unlike that of earth, yet
so sinister that it seemed an orb of devils; the forms
were graceful; the faces had a beauty of their own,
but shone with such evil meaning that they fascinated
like snakes; amongst them I could recognise the great
conquerors and monarchs and warriors and colossal

228 Limanora

criminals whose faces or the representations of whose
faces I had seen upon earth; war and pillage were
their occupations; cunning and force, hypocrisy and
arrogance, were their weapons. In horror I fled from
the sight of their internecine passions and into the
depths of the night I sped on. So varied was the con-
stitution of the orbs that I approached, so marvellous
the range of the kinds of beings inhabiting them, that
my mind seemed to sink under the task of imagining
them. Everything was in transition, there was no
rest for any form of energy in the cosmos. On it must
sweep towards a higher transformation or a lower. I
saw beings that seemed to be the very acme of crea-
tion, so beautiful and noble were they, so purged of
all grossness and materiality; yet ever beyond them I
found some form they looked up to and yearned to
reach. Below me I could see on endless orbs lower
and lower kinds of energy receding into darker night,
yet ever pressing upwards, step by step. What an
eternity of ascent was before them! I^ooking up, my
soul was drawn to some great centre my eyes could not
discern; the exhilarant force seemed to give me wings
finer and nobler than those of my body. With infinite
longing I left my material part behind floating slowly
in space. A trance came upon me as I flew upwards
with lightning speed and I swooned with the ecstasy
of final achievement.

Then I awoke, still lying in my pendulous rest.
Morning had broken and the cosmic strains had died
away. This dream-flight had been but the climax of
the purification. Such music, such electric impulse
had been poured about us as we slept, that our spirits
could not but accomplish these imaginary voyages
through space and time. Without this sublime up-

The Duomovamolan 229

lifting into the diviner realms of ether our souls might
have fallen back to the mean purposes and ambitions
of earth induced by the fears of the invasion and the
necessities of its repulse. Now we walked like angels
amongst men, a wall of eternity separating us from the
gross needs of war and defence. We were again on
the upward path that leads towards the highest, and,
purified and ennobled, were eager again for the imme-
diate duties of life.

Such purifications of the soul occurred amongst the
community as a whole whenever any influence tended
to drag it down to a lower plane. Their eyes were
drawn downwards; they had again to be turned to the
goal of all energy. Victory over such a conqueror as
Choktroo had to be given its due insignificant propor-
tion in the results and aims of life, else it might atavise
some of their spirits and bring to life ambitions buried
for long ages. One night's voyage amongst the in-
finities was enough to throw human conquests, however
great they might seem, into pettiness and oblivion.
Thus the evil spirit such events might raise was exor-
cised, and yet the sensuous power of the music by
which the exorcism was achieved was evaded. Mere
music, such as I had been accustomed to hear with
luxurious passion in my old home, wt>uld have let our
spirits, after raising them to the heights of ecstasy,
fall crashing into the world of commonplace as soon as
it ceased; but this cosmophonic harmony permanently
soothed and elevated the embruted soul. It implanted
thoughts so high that it seemed sacrilege to return to
any lower plane.

CHAPTER XVI

THEIR HEAVEN AND THEIR HEU,

THE race returned to its daily life, purified and
elevated. The danger of intrusion upon their
upward struggle had called out on wonted vigour; and
the expulsion of the grosser elements and ambitions
which threatened to accompany this had resulted in
clear gain for their progress. The pace at which they
developed greatly quickened; and we felt the pulses of
the race beat with the eagerness of prevision. Every
new age had accelerated its advance till it seemed to
have breasted all possibility, yet as the step grew
swifter and swifter the lightning swiftness of a far past
seemed to them but a snail's pace. Back the darkness
of the future was pushed, and new vistas opened where
the black wall of fate had seemed to face them.

One of the most striking proofs of their advancement
was to them the rapidly developing love and power
of foreseeing. They seemed to live in the future, and
that future was an ever-receding circle like the horizon
ahead of them, widening and widening as they rose
above mere earth necessities. A considerable section
of their community was devoted to pioneering for the
race, exploring the possibilities of the future; and
whenever there was a danger that the energy of de-

230

Their Heaven and their Hell 231

velopment would slacken the imaginations of the youth
were fired by a sight of all that they might be.

One of the chief duties of the imaginative pioneers of
the race was to prepare a vision of the time to come
that would at once appeal to the youthful fancy and
fire it to renewed effort; for often in a generation a
family or individual would become so absorbed in
a special pursuit that the idea of the whole was ob-
scured; and to prevent or obviate this false perspect-
ive imaginative prevision was ever and again needed.
An easy bird's-eye view of all that the race might
become was the best means of attaining this.

Another magnificent edifice was set apart for this
purpose, again on the slopes of Lilaroma, not to give
outlook, but. merely to draw all eyes. It was perhaps
the most impressive of the great buildings of Limanora;
so vast were its proportions that it seemed almost a
city in itself; for in huge subsidiary halls every phase
of the possibilities of their civilisation was represented.
These were dwarfed by the central hall, which seemed
large enough to contain the whole of them. In it all
the phases of the future were focussed in what they
called the mornalan, or time-telescope. This made the
pictures of what they might become live and move
before the eyes of the gazers, who as they gazed through
one of the many thousand eye-pieces seemed to look
upon life itself in its noblest ideals.

My first visit to the great building, which they called
Terralona, or millenarium, was not long after the final
repulse of Choktroo. Into the younger and less puri-
fied hearts of the community the idea of warlike glory
had returned with some force, even though we realised
intellectually how shallow and false and retrograde it
was. The introduction to what I might call the

232 Limanora

heaven of the race ought to have come naturally later
in life, when we had passed completely out of pupilage
and assumed the full duties and privileges of maturity;
but it seemed necessary to erase from our emotions
this atavistic taint that the appearance of Choktroo and
his expeditions had begotten in us. The national puri-
fication had succeeded in making earthly ambitions
seem insignificant, but as we settled down again to our
pursuits the awe that the cosmophone had bred in us
grew fainter. The world narrowed into a prison-
house, and our daily duties forced a recoil to a wider
sphere of ambitions, such as we had seen out in the
archipelago in the masterful wars so lately witnessed.
It was time, indeed, that some of us were brought into
the presence of the immediate ideals of the race towards
which they were as a whole struggling.

We were now to enter upon a new epoch of our
existence and to know the wider heaven in which our
own special pursuits took their orbit. We were there-
after to drink at the purer fountains of inspiration, to
know the rewards of all our struggles, the possibilities
that lay within the reach of a measurable number of
years.

Up through the morning air we flew, exhilarate with
the wine of healthy life, joyous in anticipation. My
proparents were with us, and explained in answer to
our inquiries the character of the building we were to
visit. It absorbed the best energies of some of the most
imaginative and artistic families of the island. They
were ever forging ahead of their own work. Like life,
their art never rested. What they imagined to-day
grew familiar or even tame to-morrow. The conse-
quence was that the inside of the edifice was never two
days alike, and the most frequent visitor never found

Their Heaven and their Hell 233

it monotonous. There was no such thing as a fixed
paradise for any race; it varied, it must vary, with
every development or retrogression of its members.
Heaven was merely the brightest ideal that a people
could imagine for itself; and the heaven of a highly
progressive race was rapidly antiquated, and in the
long flight of ages came to neighbour their hell. It is
like climbing a mountain; the shining peak we long to
attain as we start from the plains at dawn is found to
be but a lower ridge of plateau which conceals the
gleam of higher snows; these again when reached are
found to be overtopped by still higher peaks. The dif-
ference is that in truly advancing human life the pro-
cess seems unending. There is no spiritual ambition,
no ideal, no creed, no ethical code, but when realised
in practice is found to reveal something higher still
to long for and realise. A stationary heaven means a
stagnant civilisation.

Onwards we sped as we discussed or listened, ever
nearer to the vast pile of buildings that was our goal.
We who had never been inside or known its purpose
tingled with expectation. Even our elders, we could
see, were eager and alert with anticipated pleasure.
They were sure to see some new and striking features
in the fore-picture.

It was with great awe that we found ourselves within
Terralona; for we had entered the great central hall
at once, without any attempt to study the separate
sections of the experiments in progress depicted in the
subsidiary halls. It was more impressive in its pro-
portions and size than any I had yet seen, and was
dimly lit with that strange, diffusive, centreless light
of which they had command. In no one part was
the light brightest, so that it was impossible to say

234 Limanora

whence it came or how it was produced. The roof
rose so high and the walls were so far apart that we
found flight easy inside; and there were platforms all
round for leaping into the air and taking flight. Along
the farther wall we could see many Limanorans hover-
ing, like butterflies that alight for a moment and then
flit to another flower. There were also rising to the
roof hundreds of tiers of different kinds of rests.

What these were for I could not conjecture, unless
they were placed for easy flight. At length we reached
that end of the building and saw that every rest was
placed so as to bring the eyes level with a large lens
set in the wall. We each mounted into one of them,
and I set my face against the smooth transparency.
The sight that met me I cannot even at this distance
describe. There seemed to be miles and miles of space
beyond filled with a representation of an island which
I soon recognised as Limauora; but it seemed to be
afloat in the azure of the sky, and from it a pathway of
silken threads of light led upwards to the stars, which
floated within neighbourly distance of it. Busy travel-
lers sped up and down the climbing flightway with a
swiftness that almost obscured their form and size. It
was only when they rested at either goal that I could
see their features or study their nature. They were
Limanorans, yet completely transformed. The tissue
of their bodies seemed like light itself, so transparent
and filmy was it. Their wings seemed a part of them-
selves, and their flight was as easy as a swallow's.
They moved through the air like shreds of sunlight or
animated snowflakes, with power to fly up or down,
often at lightning speed. In their faces were none of
the deep shadows of baffled thought or blind emotion,
but they seemed supremely happy in their enfranchise-

Their Heaven and their Hell 235

ment from earth. Yet they were but human, only a
few steps removed from the humanity I saw around
me. They had still upon their faces the look of pity
so frequent amongst the Linianorans when they gazed
out on the men and life of other lands; but it was only
when they gazed or travelled downwards that this took
the place of the serene calm which marked them out as
sages. At times an agitation marked their gait as they
set out on the gauzy pathway of the stars. I could
feel that there was still a world beyond that which they
had reached, and that towards this they must progress
with eager thought and effort.

It was the inhabitants of other stars that they
were trying to emulate or gain as friends. They could
live in the intervening ether and found movement
through it rapid as thought. Their highest wishes,
the subjects of their imagination, encountered little
obstacle or friction in the accomplishment. They were
evidently nearer omnipotence over the forces around
them than they had ever been. Their bodies were so
much dematerialised that they were not far from the
state and texture of their souls. Thought was not
clogged with an earthy matter so different from itself
as to hold it down till freed by death. Yet I could
see that there were limits to their actions. The forces
of other worlds and the conditions of interstellar space
narrowed and checked their activity. They could not
yet create; they could only transform what already
existed, for there I saw one pair, moulding a creature
perfect according to their ideals and trying to breathe
life into it, and not yet could they know the centre of
all being. The path was still upwards and onwards.

Their activity was no longer restricted to the imme-
diate confines of the earth. Beyond and above it they

236 Limanora

soared till it became an insignificant speck of light in
the azure, busily exploring the universes that strewed
infinity and finding out the higher and ever higher life
that inhabited them. I could see them marking on
their itineraries of the sky the orbs to be avoided for
their degenerate or degraded forms of life or energy.
Every grade of existence was found and indicated by
brighter light or deeper shadow. They loved to linger
over those orbs whose dwellers were but a step above
them, watching their actions and thoughts and learn-
ing their higher ambitions. At a distance they hovered
over the worlds of beings many stages beyond them in
the evolution of energy, afraid lest they might be re-
pulsed as degenerate. As they watched, their longing
study helped them to rise more rapidly in the scale of
being, and back they would come to Limanora with
new thoughts and methods and set themselves thus
equipped to work out with increasing pace their own
evolution.

This vast widening of their horizon was evidently
an era in their history, it added such lightning swift-
ness to their rise in the scale of existence, it gave them
such power of fulfilling whatever they designed or
even imagined. Nobler and nobler ideals remained to
be discovered in every corner of the cosmos. They
had only to sail out and investigate, .and then, return-
ing with higher thoughts and ways of life, mould their
being to them. And to die, — what was it now but to
slough off a trammelling form? Death was to them
an ecstasy. Every moment of advance was to them a
death, a death of the old, a realisation of the nobler
and higher.

Such was the representation I watched through my
optic glass; for my proparents interpreted what I

Their Heaven and Their Hell 237

saw, and showed me the spiritual meaning of this cos-
morama of the future. The details of the living
picture I had not time to mark ; nor were my guard-
ians willing that these should distract my attention
from the central ideas; they emphasised the guiding
principles of the new life we might perhaps soon lead,
and the glory of it overcame my earth-born ambitions.
What a pitiful figure did Choktroo and his armies and
fleets seem in comparison with such a life! All the
great conquerors and heroes of earth were pigmies seen
in a light like this, slaves to brute longings and ambi-
tions. I grew ashamed of ever having harboured any-
thing but contempt for even the greatest career of
mortal upon earth.

Nor yet were we done with our cure. The imagina-
tive artists had filled another and complementary edifice
with living pictures of all that by means of horror could
drive us forward on the path of progress. It was called
Ciralaison, or the museum of terrors. I had often heard
of it and had imagined it as a place of unending torture,
a Limanoran and rationalised version of the hell of
Christendom, and looked forward with much loathing
and curiosity to the sight of it. We were taught that
this was no imaginary place, but the too real result of
all retrogression and encouragement of atavism, and
that there was nothing supernatural in it, but that it
was the natural outcome of all lapses from the existing
ethical path of advance. It was the contrivance of
nature herself to prevent degeneration.

As I had read Dante's Inferno, it was easy for me to
map out the features of Ciralaison. I knew the vices
and faults they most shrank from, and these would
define their own natural punishments. As we winged
our way towards the sombre edifice, perched, strangely

238 Limanora

enough, upon one of the most prominent spurs of
roma that beetled over the sea, I let my mind wander
over what was soon to meet my eyes; pictured a
place of intense woe, full of the horrors of a mediaeval
place of torture; I could almost imagine I heard the
weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

We entered the gloomy porch and passed into the
central hall; it was almost the exact counterpart of
Terralona, except that there was no brilliant sugges-
tion of all that was beautiful and noble. There was
the same dim suffusion of light, the same lofty wall of
lenses with rests, the same series of flight platforms
round the other walls. With some precipitancy I
made for one of the optic rounds in the wall, and the
first sight I saw struck me as the most commonplace
and familiar. It was a representation of one of the
foul lanes of our Western cities. There were the gut-
ter children, the reeling drunkards issuing from the
gin palaces, the cursing drabs behind them, the tat-
ters, the filth, the dilapidated buildings. It was but
an unending series of instantaneous photographs mov-
ing with great speed under stereoscopic glasses, whilst
the sounds accompanying the scene, having impressed
themselves similarly on long strips of irelium, were in
one of their sound machines reproducing themselves.
It was indeed the commonest and most repulsive of
sights in the east end of any of our large towns. What
astonished me was that it should have been taken from
.European life; and yet, when I gazed more atten-
tively at it and put the sound-magnifier to my ears, I
knew that it was not European. The words spoken
were in a language I did not know, and the rags of the
men and women were the rags of a national costume I
did not recognise.

Their Heaven and Their Hell 239

I shifted my rest and lens, and I saw a rustic village,
such as I had known in my boyhood, with the toilers
busy at their work. At a distance it was a happy
scene; for the men and women were absorbed in occu-
pation and seemed to have forgotten the evils of man-
kind. They were much in the open air, which was
bright with the colours of the sunlight; and the child-
ren's voices sounded merry at play or humming like
bees from the window of the schoolhouse. It was a
picture such as city poets had often painted as ideal
and primitive happiness, yet some contrivance seemed
to analyse it all for my mind and reveal to me that it
was even more repulsive than that of the foul city lane.
Not to my hearing or my eyes did this come; but to
my magnetic sense, ill-developed though it was. I
felt a deadly stupor over the whole pressing out the
higher life of every rustic. Not the diseases which
often overtook them unprovided, not the poverty
leaving no outlook for their old age except reluctant
and hated charity, not the constant slavery of toil, or
the meagre assuagement of its woes by a weekly booze
in the tavern, weighed upon my spirit and made me
sad to look at the scene. It was the stagnant spiritual
level on which they and their children to the thou-
sandth generation must live, without power of per-
ceiving the nobleness that was above them and around
them, without the chance of ever developing the
spiritual energy that was in them, without one ap-
proach to the line of infinite progress going on through-
out the universe. To stand still or recede was the true
inferno of the Limanorans.

Again I changed my optic glass and a greater sad-
ness came to me through my magnetic sense. I saw
men and women such as I used to envy for their re-

240 Limanora

spectable life, their serene comfort, and their sure grasp
of both worlds trooping into buildings for religious
worship They bowed and sang, they genuflected
and prayed, they raised their eyes to the ceiling, they
groaned and professed to pity themselves as miserable
sinners; yet I could feel they had an inner conscious-
ness that these performances were superfluous on their
part, so comfortably worldly, so charitably godly were
they. As they rose to leave the temple, they seemed
to purr and pat their sleek stomachs in supreme self-
content. Yet through the magnetic magnifier I knew
that they were in a lower circle of the inferno than the
rustic slaves. Their past stood out through many
generations of ancestors exactly the same as their
present or better. Never a chance had they of pro-
gressing; they thought they had reached perfection as
far as earthly conditions would allow. They prayed
that they might be made better; but that was only as
they prayed that their sins might be forgiven when they
were certain that they had committed none, or as
they prayed for guidance in their daily duties when they
knew that no one could manage them better than
they. Stagnancy was written on every feature of their
faces and of their lives, fatty degeneration of every
faculty and organ necessary to development. Their
ethics, their religion, their business, their habits of life
had all reached a stage that made criticism superfluous
and that knew no higher outlook.

The next scene that came through the lens was one
of the most envied of Christendom. Men and women
of the highest birth and best breeding were moving to
and fro in brilliantly lit and decorated rooms, in the
largest of which the dance was proceeding. In another
room a luxurious supper was laid, varied and fine

Their Heaven and Their Hell 241

enough to tempt the eye and palate of the most fastidi-
ous gourmand. Voluptuous music and scents filled
the air; witty conversation was stirring even the most
languid faces to smiles. What could be more perfect
on earth than the enjoyment of such a scene ? Yet this
was a deeper slough of hell than any I had yet viewed.
The whole of life was concentrated in the senses, the
least progressive of all the organs of human nature, the
organs soonest sated with what they desire. And what
a horror of life was revealed beneath all this brilliancy!
A crescendo of such pleasures was needed to drive off
ennui; and such a crescendo was not to be found.
The young still lived in hopeful mirage. The middle-
aged were sick of it all. The old sneered cynically
over everything or babbled the senility of second child-
hood. The vulgar consequences of vice or the en-
tanglements of crime, the surfeit of pleasure or the
tedium of life kept most of them within one step of
suicide. Their course was ever downwards. I pitied
these magnificent voluptuaries, in all their ephemeral
pursuits and aims. The brilliancy was only an attempt
to hide the ghastly grinning of death and corruption in
the reality underneath.

Another change of the point of view, and the world
of fame revealed itself in its gilded horrors. I watched
the struggling poet trampled beneath the foot of luxury
and contempt, happy if only he died earl}' in the hate-
ful wrestle for glory. I saw the drowning agonies of
the novices in the sea of literature, appealing in vain
for help to the wealthy as they passed in barges lulled
by the rich music of flattery; here and there a frantic
swimmer clutched at help, and out again he was thrust
into the depths by the minions of literary fame. How
little the rejected knew of the reality that they strove

16

242 Limanora

after ! I looked into the hearts of the famous and saw
corrupt masses of jealousy and hate, or hollow shells
echoing the misery of life. The most appalling sight
was, not the failures in art and learning, science and
commerce, but the successes. Behind a mask of smil-
ing prosperity and conventional enjoyment of the world
there was but a handful of dust that bore the weary load
of existence in agony.

Generation after generation came and passed through
this torturing fire, knowing not why they bore the
pangs for threescore years and ten, or whither they
were borne. They seemed to improve, but only sank
deeper into the original barbarism. Here and there
they picked out a name of one long dead and wor-
shipped it; but the shrine was empty; it was only a
name, and not the personality for which it had once
stood. Behind I could hear the spirit wailing and
cursing its fate and the falsehood and hypocrisy of his
adorers. He knew the hollowness and pretence of the
whole performance; he knew that the name had be-
come a weapon for offending and maiming those who
in their innocence were struggling for fame, as he had
done, in vain.

The deepest circle of hell was still to meet my
eyes. I thought, as I was guided to it, that it must
be that of murderers and furious criminals. My
amazement grew, as I looked into the lens and saw
that the actors, or I should more truly say the sufferers,
were the great of the earth, the monarchs and states-
men and warriors, who drew all men's eyes to them as
the masters of life. A movement on the part of my
guide touched some key, and a strange gleam of un-
earthly light threw out into relief the hidden mechan-
ism of their existence. Round everyone was a network

Their Heaven and Their Hell 243

of threads like a spider's web, and the controlling ends
of the threads led up obscurely into the hands of a
crowd of miscreants, who lay out of sight of the ap-
plauding mobs; when a limb or a lip or an eye seemed
to move of its own accord to the music of huzzas, it
was jerked by a thread in the control of some scowling
villain who worked the movement for his own murder-
ous purpose. These gorgeous figures were but puppets
playing a marionette-play upon the stage of life. One
or two of the strongest seemed instinct with the breath
of originality, but a still stronger light revealed ada-
mantine chains woven around them, and attached to
these one master-chain which disappeared into infinity;
they were in the spider-web of fate. Still more awful
was the sight of their own hearts; each had a crimson-
taloned vulture gnawing the vitals, and each saw every
detail of the agonising sight; nor could he move to the
right or left except to cluch at the bared heart of his
rival and torture him. Who could imagine hell more
appalling than this? Yet up the giddy approach to
the seats of the mighty climbed eager competitors for
any place in this torture-chamber death or defeat might
empty.

Then behind all stretched the curtain of infinity;
and as it rose the ranks of worlds and universes ap-
peared, dwarfing into pettiness the sights that had
racked my eyes. Life and the ideals of life rose
higher and higher up through the regimented worlds,
and the little inferno I had watched became a micro-
scopic speck on the round of existence. The shadow
of their heaven fell over their heads. The agony I had
seen became but an atom in infinity.

CHAPTER XVII

MY EDUCATION CONTINUED

THE gaze into the probabilities of the future and
into the realities of the past ejected from my sys-
tem whatever of dangerous admiration I might have
felt for the career of such a military adventurer as
Choktroo. In spite of my self-control and rapidly de-
veloping reasoning faculty, there lurked in me the same
longing for power that had been so evident in my
cabin-boy. Though he had fallen so wretchedly there
was a romance about his career which appealed to some-
thing deep-seated in my spirit. I knew what a hypo-
crite arid scoundrel he had become in order to make his
success, yet the success seemed to condone his offences
against the progress of humanity. The lust of rule
that lies in the hearts of all men had not yet been eradi-
cated from mine. I had advanced so far as to be
ashamed of it; and I tried to reason it down or to con-
ceal even from myself the fact of its existence; but
my guardians knew that it was there, and they took
the necessary precautions against its growth. Thus
did I pass with the whole people through the national
purification ending with a glimpse of their heaven and
their hell.

And now I was ready to re-enter on my process of
244

My Education Continued 245

education. The more spiritual portions of my nature
had been remoulded or confirmed to follow in the true
path of Limanoran development. The last purificatory
process had revealed in me the virtuous or progressive
balance that ensured success in the island. The minds
of my guardians were now at rest with regard to my
spiritual future, and I was on the fair way to become
one of the community.

Still my physical constitution lagged far behind the
race. Nor had I any hope of ever making up this
lost time, so much had the education of generations
and the accumulations of heredity done for them. My
senses were but feebly developed compared with those
of the lyimanorans; and though they gave sensuous
faculties a far lower place than the most advanced
thinkers I had ever known of in Europe, they by no
means neglected them, but considered them important
instruments of progress in the material conditions of
their life.

My proparents thought it necessary that I should be
brought in the development of my sensuous perceptions
nearer to their own level, now that my love of reason
was so strong as to preclude the possibility of being
overwhelmed by sensuous energy. They began with
the most intellectual of the senses, the eyesight, and by
the help of magnetism, hypnotic suggestion, and con-
stant practice under their tuition, they soon brought
me to see farther afield and more keenly into the struc-
ture of things around me than I had in Europe thought
it possible for the human eye to accomplish. I could
perceive with the naked eye stars that I had been
able to see before only through the telescope. I began
to note the changes of tissue underneath the skull of
my neighbours when any great thought or emotion

Limanora

stirred in them, and could use their wonderful instru-
ments of far and near research with appreciation.
Through these instruments faint stars appeared moons,
and the nearer planets revealed many of the secrets of
their surface; whilst the elements resolved themselves
into even simpler constituents. What still lay beyond
I could not imagine, yet there were manifestly worlds,
intensive and extensive, still to be explored beyond the
limits of these aids to sight.

In the life of an individual I could not expect to ap-
proach the development of optic faculty attained by
this people. This impressed itself more deeply upon
me when my guardians tried to evolve in me the mag-
netic power of eye which every Limanoran had by
nature. When any one of them turned his full glance
upon me, it was like encountering the direct beams of
the sun; I had to drop my eyelids in self-defence. It
was this that gave them such hypnotic power over
Choktroo and his followers. Their eye was an active
exponent of the soul within as well as a passive re-
cipient of messages from the world without, and could
concentrate into its glance the energy of their powerful
wills. Any one of these Limanorans amongst the
feebler-eyed millions of the rest of the world would
have proved himself a master-spirit. He would, with
his unhesitating will and the magnetism of his eye,
have kept masses of men in check and moulded them
into a unity, and the great commanders of history
would have blenched before his gaze.

From the first I had felt uneasy under the full glance
of my island friends, in spite of its kindliness and
benevolence. Before I left England, I had been
supposed to have the mesmeric faculty to an excep-
tional degree. Now I found it pale before those mar-

My Education Continued 247

vellous Limanoran eyes, and all the training and
physical aid iny proparents could give me in this direc-
tion, though they added greatly to my energy of will
and eye, only brought out my hopeless inferiority. I
was able at last to bear their glances with ease, and
even to raise my eyes to theirs for a few seconds; but
I ceased to hope for the attainment of their ocular com-
mand or their magnetic power.

Even their passive electric sense was far beyond my
possibility in many of its ramifications. For years I
had wondered why their couriers into far regions of the
sky could without any chart or landmarks find their way
back to their island home with such ease. It could not
be by means of vision ; for they often went flying above
the clouds to the antipodes; nor could it be by smell:
for that sense was not nearly so much developed as the
others. In some of my now more distant flights with
Thyriel I discovered that they homed by the electric
sense. It had become keen in the measurements of
amounts of electricity; and every locality had its own
electric possibilities, not to speak of a certain peculiar
quality in its electricity which differentiated it from
all others. One of the most important branches of
their education was the magnetography of the earth
and sky. Although I never got beyond a vague per-
ception of differences in the degrees of electricity, it was
of some use to me in my flights to have learned the
elements of this great descriptive science. I could
tell with fair accuracy how high I was above the earth
and whether I was drifting away from L,imanora or
towards it; for the amount of electricity in any region
varied within certain definite limits and the conditions
governing it were constant for long periods of time;
these were, roughly, the metals beneath the surface of

248 Limanora

the earth, the differences in temperature of the strata
of air above, the evaporation and chemical changes on
the earth below, and the periodicity of the influence of
the sun and the stars. Their electric charts of the sky
and air were ever in process of correction, but so slightly
and gradually in each region that it was only after
long periods that the Limanoran couriers had to revise
their magnetographic knowledge; indeed it was their
reports after long flights which generally led to the
minute corrections of their charts. It was the work of
a few minutes only to learn the new modifications, for
their charts were exact miniature models of that which
they were intended to represent; the learner had only
to touch a spring and by the inner mechanism of the
globe out would ray to each point of it the electricities
that in degree and quality belonged to the region indi-
cated; the member of the electric family who guided
him would explain the changes that had occurred since
he last consulted the instrument, and his own electric
sense would tell him the rest.

Nor was this magnetographic training useful merely
for the purpose of pilotage through the heavenly
vault. It enabled any courier to seek the region
where he would most easily recharge the little en-
gines which he bore with him under his arms to
aid in his wing journey. Although he could prevent
the complete exhaustion of these power auxiliaries
by supplying them with some of the magnetism in
his own body, it was only in emergencies that he did
this; for his own system needed electric recuperation
as well. Whenever this was required, he made for
some region of the air that he knew to be highly elec-
tric; and there he floated, whilst with his receptive
sense he drew in new stores for his own system and

My Education Continued 249

for his little armpit engines. Then he went on his
way rejoicing, exhilarated by his new energy. One of
the purposes of their frequent flight into atmospheric
spheres other than their own was to drink in new mag-
netism from one of the great sky fountains.

When a Limanoran returned from an aerial flight
there was renewed life in him. His eyes glowed with
a heightened radiancy; I could see a soft light play
about them in the dark, and this, if needed, he could
make even piercing in its brilliancy. He required no
light to guide him in the deepest night. His electric
sense gathered in from the atmosphere the scattered
radiance that was hidden from my sight; and from his
eyes he could emit this electricity in the form of light.
For me, who, under all their training, was never able
to develop such power over the unseen forces of the air,
the eyes of Thyriel were a guide in our flight through
the night sky; and by day so gentle a brilliance
played around them it was little wonder they fascinated
and drew me ever to them. After experiencing their
power, I was not surprised at the hypnotic influence
Ivimanoran eyes had had over the leaders of the hostile
expedition.

It did not astonish me to find that by means of their
electric energy they could move vast masses which no.
mere muscular force could have touched. I had a con-
stitution that seemed to be physically far stronger than
Thyriel's; yet, if she had time to reinforce her store of
magnetism, she could accomplish feats of strength I
could not approach. In her fragile system there seemed
to reside a giant's energy; but this was only at times,
and especially after she had made some long journey
into the regions of the air. The tissues and fibres of
her body seemed to grow tenfold stronger when the

250 Limanora

new electric energy tingled along her nerves. In only
the faintest way was I ever able to develop my electric-
receptive sense so far as to realise what a new store
meant to their physical powers.

Yet my guardians set themselves to bring out my
latent electric sense or firla. After much practice and
the application of many stimuli I began to feel im-
pulses more keenly even when they came from a dis-
tance: the back of my neck grew more and more
sensitive, so that I would wheel round instinctively
when anyone looked at me from behind. There was
almost hope that I should, after many years' practice,
come to distinguish the different kinds of emotion with
which anyone, though unseen, might look at me; and
I could produce by a concentration of will-force in the
eyes a certain luminosity, noticeable when I stood in
deep darkness.

My power of sight was greatly strengthened by this
new electric faculty that the eyes acquired. I began
to raise my eyelids before the penetrative glance of a
Limanoran, or even the full majesty of the sun; but
never could I hope to reach their analytic power of
vision. Their senses were distinguished from those of
the rest of mankind by intellectuality, and were, I
thought, not merely the observers and reporters of the
mind, but its outlying parts or functions. The eye
especially seemed to do what through its means reason
and experiment might have done. At a glance a
Limanoran would tell to an inch the distance of any
object, and was not far wrong in his estimate of the
space between the earth and any star when its rays
reached his eye. He could distinguish one ray from
another by its colour or colour-constituents and by
its magnetic affinities. What he had learned in the

My Education Continued 251

use of the inamar or spectroscope in the lava wells and
in the fusion of metals in Rimla had come to be a visual
instinct. With scarcely a minute's hesitation he would
tell the predominant elements in any one of the
heavenly bodies. Doubtless the firla had something
to do with this analytic power. One of their imagina-
tive pioneering books held out the by no means remote
possibility of catching symptoms of the life which, they
knew well, filled the dim worlds above.

Their auditory powers had been far less developed
than their visual, and gave but faint hope of transcend-
ing interstellar space, and my training soon brought
me within easy distance of their hearing capacity.
The range of this faculty both at its upper and its
lower limit had been considerably extended. Sounds
dangerous on account of their loudness to the inner
mechanism of ordinary ears were by means partly of
strengthening the protective cartilages and partly of a
trevamolan or graduated modifier of sound, which they
constantly wore, made harmless and even gentle and
enjoyable. Those that were too faint to reach any
human ear became audible to me after some training
in the use of their vamolans or makro-mikrakousts. So
greatly had these been improved along with the power
of hearing that they could discriminate the different
noises of microscopic life. These vamolans in their
application of electricity to hearing could make the
buzzing of an insect sound like the roar of thunder.
By modifications of them any of the sounds heard
through them could be recorded for ever.

Thus had been formed a library and museum of the
phonology of animal life. They had been able to study
the records of sounds emitted by the various species of
animals and had come to know the meaning of each

252 Limanora

sound before they had driven all but microscopic life
from the island; thus they had learned by means ot
the recording vamolans the language of animals. The
birds of the air I have seen follow the cries of Thyriel,
gathering around her in clouds, as she flew, until by
a sudden change of tone she would scatter the flutter-
ing masses to the four winds. Even the fish of the sea
would rise and leap above the waves to her notes;
ferocious, devouring monsters would leave their prey
and follow gently in her train. Most of this power
over the undeveloped creation was due to the record
and study of their cries; but not all. The magnetism
of her personality had a strange effect upon the wildest
birds of prey: it seemed to bear with it tacitly the les-
son of lyimanoran civilisation that no life was to be de-
stroyed by those who meant to make the best of life;
there was a gentle, merciful spirit in the glow of the
eyes. I have seen her take a wounded bird to her
bosom as she flew, and, putting new life into it by the
stroke of her fingers, set it free, strong and happy.

There was a life-giving power in the tips of Lima-
noran fingers that puzzled me at first. Why the mere
touch should so soothe the lower creation that the agony
of their wounds would soon vanish and their cries cease
bewildered me for a time. My own pains rapidly dis-
appeared under the touch of my proparents. I after-
wards knew that part of the active magnetism of their
system came through their fingers and they helped me
to develop this channel of influence in myself. I could
at last by passing my fingers over Thyriel's hair or face
relieve any tension of her nerves which might have
produced pain; nay, I could hear her hair crackle
under my touch when I had charged my system with
much electricity. Once or twice I was able to draw a

My Education Continued 253

wounded bird to me, and change by my stroke on the
feathers its cries of pain into low notes of content;
but I could never draw the winged creation to me in
clouds as Thyriel did.

It was all the more surprising to me that they fenced
off animal life from their island. What might they
not have done with such powers over the lower crea-
tion? When I put my question into words, the answer
was unhesitating and unanswerable. All failures in
development had to be thrust from the path of pro-
gress; they could do nothing but clog it. If the
Limanorans had little hesitation in the case of their
own flesh and blood, they had still less when they had
to deal with animals. It was quite true that many of
the more highly developed of the servants of man had
nobler natures than most of their masters, deeper
loyalty, greater sincerity, truer and more lasting cour-
age; much might and did come from companionship
with their primitive and guilt-proof natures; but the
fact that when associated with man they were destined
to serve, made such good impracticable and rather
brought out the mean and brutal tyranny of man than
helped to implant in his nature their own virtues.
Even with such noble qualities as they had it was im-
possible for them to overleap the many ages their sys-
tems had lagged behind in other respects, the open
offensiveness of their grosser animal appetites and
needs, their lack of that great instrument and teacher
of the brain, a fully developed hand, and the inability
to foresee beyond a few hours, days, or months. Nor
could any human process prolong their period of life
and postpone their day of dissolution. It was not a
good thing for these pioneers of the human race to see
the approach of death and its agonies in a being that

254 Limanora

could not assuage or postpone it. Still less beneficial
was it to touch the carcases and reduce them to harm-
less atoms. The presence of animals meant the daily
obtrusion of offensive sights that would either shock
or degrade their natures. All that animals could do
for them was already done by their science or their
machinery. Nothing that had fallen so far behind in
the race of life was worth the trouble of missionary ism;
for the energy that was in it had a better chance of
rising swiftly in the scale of existence by dissolution
and entrance into some other form.

None the less had they studied the language of ani-
mals when they had had the opportunity. It belonged
to the orchestration of the world, and all the sounds
of nature were of interest to them. They were in the
habit of visualising what they heard by a refined and
complicated instrument which they called a thinamar,
and had long been able to translate into its appropriate
form and colour every sound, inarticulate as well as
articulate. Through long use of this instrument the
tones of nature bore with them something that ap-
pealed to their eye. I never grew expert enough in
its use to make the visualisation of sound an instinct;
still less could I reverse the process. A modification
of their thinamar had enabled them to translate sights
into the symbols of sound, and by skill in using it they
had come to attach certain notes to certain sights.
Thus a noble landscape would appeal to their imagina-
tion not only through the eye, but in the form of music,
and they spoke of hearing the beauty of a star or a
flower. A section of this instrument did for compli-
cated sounds what the spectroscope, or inamar as they
called it, did for light. Every substance, every indi-
vidual living thing, had its natural and peculiar note;

My Education Continued 255

and the linamar analysed what seemed to me the sim-
plest sound into its constituent primary notes, each of
which revealed its source. Aided by their mikrakousts
and inakrakousts, it enabled the I,imanorans to analyse
the chemical elements of any object, whether at a great
distance from them or too minute to appeal to their
senses.

Their makrakousts were instruments which by means
of electric currents and magnetism could make a beam
of light transmit any sound to its source, or make the
ear gather in the same way whatsoever sounds were
filling the air at any point on its course. I knew when
I saw a steady flash in any direction that the sound of
some point was getting tapped by one of these instru-
ments. Each had an apparatus for laying and keeping
fixed its luminous telegraph-wire along which it re-
ceived and transmitted. An application of this in the
gossip-telegraph enabled them to listen to the comedy
of life as it went on in any one of the adjacent islands
of the archipelago. Their mikrakousts used the same
means for gathering the faint sounds which echoed from
the clouds or through the upper regions of the atmos-
phere and turning them into loud notes, which might be
recorded, analysed, and interpreted. Their magnifying
power was quite equal to that of the clirolan. Faint
buzzings of insects at vast distances could be collected
and made as loud as thunder. It was even applied to
cosmic sounds that impinged on the atmospheric en-
velope of the earth. Mikrakoustic balloons rose into
the upper air, and after gathering whatever faint sounds
wandered thither from outside the world, were drawn
back again to divulge their secrets; eavesdroppers of
the cosmos they were, and perchance in some future
age they would enable the L,imanoran to listen to

256 Limanora

voices from other worlds or even to communicate with
the dwellers there. A more immediate and practical
advantage of these instruments was found in medicine.
They told in clear accents the unexpected or dangerous
changes in the tissues or organs of any man's system.
They were used in the weekly medical inspection^
which every member of the commonwealth underwent.
When the keen eye, aided by the camera-microscope,
could detect nothing abnormal in the body, the mikra-
koust would tell the examiner's ear of some obstruc-
tion or deleterious change; he knew the normal sounds
of healthy action in every part when they were mag-
nified thousands of times by this instrument, and every
departure from them readily caught the ear. All the
citizens were trained to use it as an aid in diagnosis, so
that they might be able to locate in the system any
beginning of disease. It was part of the training of
my ear to use the mikrakoust and to interpret its phy-
siological revelations.

But these instruments were getting antiquated by
the rapid development of the electric sense that could,
by the aid of their various electro-magnifiers and ana-
lysers, gather in cosmic news from distances which the
sense of hearing and its aids would count infinite.
Magnetic kites and balloons rose to the uttermost
fringe of our atmosphere, whither common terrestrial
influences could reach only in such faint waves as to
be neutralised; there they gathered the electric im-
pressions and impulses coming from other planets and
even other systems. On them were recorded the vary-
ing strengths of the waves and their direction. From
these records the astronomical families could tell what
was happening of a cosmic character in universes far
out of the reach of even their lavidrolans or camera-

My Education Continued 257

telescopes, — perturbations in the atmospheres of great
unseen suns, collisions between worlds that circled
round them, births of new universes from these lost
systems, periodic disturbances of the routine revolutions
through the approach of some meteoric wanderer, the
settlement of life on worlds grown ripe for it, and the
death of outworn stars. For many generations had
they kept and classified these reports of cosmic history
and were beginning to recognise a wide periodicity in
many of them and to draw conclusions as to the path
of our universe through infinite space. It seemed to
them that there was some point far distant in the cos-
mos, round which our sun and its satellites with in-
numerable other systems of stars revolved, and that
this point, with its satellites, had its own independent
movement. Age by age, with the aid of their idrolans
or electric telescopes, and other electric instruments,
they felt that they were getting nearer and nearer to
the centre of this interwoven epicycloidal movement
and were almost convinced that it did not proceed in-
finitely, but that there was some ultimate centre which
had no movement round another. Their instincts told
them that this was the divine consciousness towards
which all things rose in the scale of being. They
never remitted their ardour and diligence in the de-
velopment of their electric sense and of the instruments
that aided it to become a receiver of cosmic news and
a recorder of cosmic history, for they were confident
that this was one of the tracks that led up through the
intricacy of the cosmos to God.

One of my greatest regrets was that my electric sense
could not follow the footsteps of these pioneers in the
infinite; it had but a dim consciousness of the reports
of their instruments, and train it as eagerly and dili-

258 Limanora

gently as I would, it lagged behind my power of vision
and even my sense of hearing. On this account I pre-
ferred to learn the results of their researches through
these two senses, for the electric reports were carefully
translated into appeals to the eye and the ear. I could
see their wonderful discoveries in the unknown, as they
worked them into picture and mechanism, and I could
listen from day to day to the orchestration of their
newly discovered spaces and movements. What seemed
at the moment an intolerable discord chimed in with
the notes which preceded or followed and formed mar-
vellous harmony. Not the least part of my education
lay in this cosmic stimulus to my imagination. Out of
my terrestrial conditions and limits I daily rose into
spheres which seemed to me more and more divine.
Sight and hearing became noble channels of the in-
fluences of infinity, instead of gross senses. I strug-
gled to bring my firla up to the enjoyment of their
labours, but ever fell back hopeless.

This was especially the case when I was brought to
examine and test their monalan or electrical distance-
analyst, for a fully developed electric sense was needed
to appreciate its refined analysis of impulses from far
distances. It was an ingenious application of an alloy
called by them labramor, or electricity sponge, and had
the power of splitting up any electric wave or impulse
into its constituent movements. Each of these had its
own clear and distinct effect upon the firla and varied
with the substance from which the impulse came or
through which it passed. All substances and elements
in the terrestrial system were classified according to
their electric impulses. Even before the Limanorans
brought the firla to its high state of sensitiveness and
efficiency, they had been able to examine the stars

My Education Continued 259

and other distant bodies and analyse their elements by
means of this classification and the application of their
alloy, labramor. Every substance or element had its
place in their tables according as it was positive or
negative in its electric impulse towards some other sub
stance or element; and all its affinities, strong or weak,
were tabulated. Thus when they turned their monalan
upon any distant body like a star they were able to
analyse its elements by means of these tables. Even
now that their firla interpreted the analysis of the
monalan without the intervention of classifications and
tables, they had another electrically analystic instru-
ment which appealed to the eye; this turned the elec-
tric impulse into a flash or glow, which at once revealed
in the inamar or spectroscope the substances or elements
whence it had come.

Their lower or more material senses I was more
nearly able to approach, even though they too were
highly intellectualised and were more the servants of
the spirit than of the animal part. In developing mine
I had more hope of raising myself to the Limanoran
level, and yet there was less stimulus; for I felt that
they looked down upon these senses of smell, taste, and
touch because of their need of close contact with their
objects; they were the primitive senses; they were
narrow and bound down to immediate matter, and
seemed poor gropers in the finite and the dark com-
pared with those rangers of infinity, the ear, the eye,
and the electric sense. It was then with a feeling of
humiliation that I saw those lower and more finite
senses in me develop so quickly, proving me a being of
a more primitive and material type.

Yet there was no neglect of these in their education
and no contempt for them and their uses; in fact con-

260 Limanora

tempt was one of the vices that they had with most
pains weeded out of their systems and civilisation.
They had not merely considered that nothing in crea-
tion, if looked into scientifically, was worthy of con-
tempt, but that contempt was the truest symptom of
crudity of character and ignorance of reality and na-
ture. Even if they had had any remains of this primal
savagery, they would not have felt it towards those
finite-seeking senses. They only set themselves to
make them more and more the servants of the soul,
the instruments of the imagination. They rejected
the idea that the arts belonged only to sight and hear-
ing. Their arts of the firla were far more important
and striking than any sculpture or painting or music
could be. Not merely as a variation on these and a
relief from them did they have arts that brought in
the senses of smell and taste and touch; these had
their own special uses in their civilisation. All of
them, but especially smell and taste, were closely
linked with memory, and through memory with imagi-
nation. A special perfume and even a special taste
would flash before the mind a scene or fact with more
vividness than even a piece of music would.

The perfumes and tastes had been classified accord-
ing to their affinity to certain virtues and ideas and to
the great deeds and scenes which best represented them.
The island was one vast flower-garden at all seasons of
the year, arranged not alone to please the eye, but to
bring by the suggestion of their perfumes the noblest
virtues and deeds constantly into the mind. For ex-
ample, wherever a child or youth was being trained,
the flowers possessing certain well-known scents which
were closely connected with the finest qualities and
ideas of the race shone profusely yet with striking art.

My Education Continued 261

The art of the gardening family did not consist merely
in arrangement of the landscape and the varied colora-
tion of it. The scent of every flower had to be taken
into consideration and the faint flavour or taste the
seed or fruit might produce in the air when sent adrift
or bruised. The problem of no science or art was so
complicated as that of gardening in this island, it had
to take account of so many senses, seasons, and con-
ditions of growth. They were never done with creat-
ing and selecting new variations of flowers and plants,
and colour, scent, and taste in the vegetable world were
as adaptable in their hands as tones in the hands of their
musical composers. Their task was made compara-
tively easy by the great development of methods and
appliances for rapid growth and decay. They had not
only complete command of the weather and clouds and
sunshine; but they could bring up and perfect flowers
in a few nights over vast areas by the use of their
streams and watering platforms and of artificial light.
When the Umanorans slept, wonders were being ac-
complished in colouring the landscape; for first some
of their great rivers would pour refreshing rain all over
the plains; and then the electric glow, brought close
over the plants, would develop their bloom-producing
capacity. As careful were the gardeners that no
withering or dead vegetable matter should ever taint
the air of the island; the moment one set of blossoms
had perfected and shown traces of decay, an electric
pruner ran in a few minutes over the whole area, and
not merely cut them off, but burnt them to dust that
fell on the roots to stimulate the new growth of the
plants. As soon as the plants had passed their bloom-
productive point, an electric life-destroyer ploughed
lightly through the soil in all directions; and by the

262 Limanora

morning what had been profusely flower-coloured the
day before was brown earth, ready for the new plant-
growth of next day. The slow-growing perennials
and bushes and trees occupied separate and fixed
quarters at a distance from the residences and the great
centres of intercourse, and all rampant vegetation and
rotting boughs and leaves were daily turned into good
soil by the electric weed-destroyer. No decay was ever
allowed to approach the senses. Their knowledge of
the secrets of the soil made them independent of rotting
or offensive manures. The particular elements of which
any kind of plant or flower robbed the soil were ac-
curately ascertained, and their chemistry enabled them
with ease to supply the deficiency after a crop had
been removed.

The gardening family had to be familiar on the one
hand with the innermost secrets of psychology, and on
the other with the last discoveries of the more material
sciences; for no one could avoid the effects of the
flowers and trees, as he could painting and sculpture,
music and firlamai. Gardening, in short, was the most
public of all the arts and the most pervasive in its re-
sults. A garden (and in Limanora there was only one
vast garden) was a great mnemonic instrument, which
could play upon the souls of the whole community at
once. That it should not be in the hands of novices,
or of unwise or wrong-thoughted men and women, was
one of the prime cares of the people. Of all families
those that managed the garden of the island had to be
most simple-hearted and true, most sure in their know-
ledge of the human heart, and most eager to stir to
what is great and noble and humane. They were the
lords of the sense of smell, one of the most immediate
portals to memory and to imagination. To have the

My Education Continued 263

complete command of one out of the six dominant
sense-entrances to the soul was, they considered, the
greatest of responsibilities, and no care was neglected
in selecting, purifying, and training the families of
gardeners.

They, too, had the superintendence of Ilarime, a
structure devoted to the arts of smell, taste, and sound
combined. Aided by the musicians and the chemists,
they produced symphonies which appealed to all three
senses and roused the imagination to exceptional
flights. The imaginative or pioneering families fre-
quented the halls of this great building daily in pursuit
of new stimulus to their faculty. Every chamber in it
had special emotions to rouse. A garden could have
only a mingled effect upon the memory and mnemonic
imagination ; Ilarime separated the effects and classified
the emotions and imaginative ideas which were to be
stimulated. Anyone entering could find out at the
porch, either by looking in the index-chamber or by
consulting one of the superintendents, what hall or
halls he ought to rest in. I had often during my edu-
cation to take refuge in Ilarime, when clogged in my
endeavours to advance by dulness of memory or im-
agination or by the weakness of some emotion. After
a time I did not need to consult a guide; I knew what
element in my soul was deficient and what emotion or
memory would stir it to activity, and by aid of the
index-hall and its graphic representation of the effect
of every chamber upon the spirit I could choose what
symphony I needed. As soon as I had entered the
hall that I had chosen, I lay down on one of their
hanging rests and shut my eyes. At once the medi-
cated atmosphere began to affect my palate, whilst
the delicate perfume entered my nostrils and my ears

264 Limanora

drank in the sweet-sounding music. Before many
minutes had passed memories of striking scenes I had
witnessed or heard of or seen represented in the island
began to rise in my mind, and the emotion I needed
thrilled me through; if it was heroism or courage, I
felt myself urged to deeds of valour; if it was benevo-
lence, I was soon inclined to rush to the help of the
suffering and the poor; if it was hope, I saw bright
visions of the future.

But this exercise was too passive to be allowed for
any length of time. The imagination and emotions
were apt to gain at the expense of the will and the
nervous energy by too frequent resort to Ilarime.
Strenuous endeavour was held to be one of the prime
essentials of progress, not only in the race, but even
more in the individual. And, though all the prevail-
ing odours and tastes and sounds of the island were
agreeable, the L,imanoraiis carried with them a small
instrument, called margol, that by an adaptation of
electricity could blunt at will the acuteness of smelling
and tasting and hearing, and, on the other hand, reduce
the powers of perfumes and flavours and sounds; it
acted by drying the air around the head and drawing
the moisture and heat from the nostrils, the tongue,
and the ears. It was partly to mitigate the force of
smells and tastes and sounds that they always kept the
atmosphere dry and cool by day. In the margol, too,
there was a combination of chemicals and electricity
which would modify any odour or flavour to suit the
taste; but if they wished to increase the strength of
any perfume or taste, they applied electric heat to the
source of it, and moistened the nostrils and the mouth.
It was one of the new peculiarities of the race that
the mucous and salivary flow was under the command

My Education Continued 265

of the will, and they could smell and taste with satis-
faction to themselves without the aid of moisture on
the organs.

Their senses of smell and taste had become by means
of their acuteness what they were originally meant to
be, the guardians of the throat and the digestion.
They told with accuracy the nature of the substances
brought to the mouth ; whatsoever would be deleterious
to the system was offensive. In most civilised peoples
what is grateful to the palate and the olfactory nerves
is often pernicious to some tissue of the body or some
faculty of the mind. Here the two senses were the
true friends and protectors of both body and soul ; there
was no seducing them or bribing them into evil or irra-
tional reports, so completely had they been saturated
with reason.

In the medical, chemical, and alimentary families
these senses were trained to a pitch that seemed to me
marvellous. By either smell or taste a member of these
families could tell the constituent elements of any
compound. A medical sage, if a man, could distinguish
by the faint odour that marked each human body
whether it was losing energy or expending it, making
progress or decaying; if a woman, the sage, in order to
make this decision, had as a rule to bring in the help
of taste; for it had remained from the primitive ani-
mal stage of man's development one of the differentiat-
ing marks of sex that the male had more energy of
smell, the female more energy of taste; now that they
had so spiritualised their senses, perfumes formed the
quickest stimulus of the masculine imagination and
flavours of the feminine. At the food vats it was
always the Limanoran women who superintended the
flavouring of any compound; whilst it was the men

266 Limanora

who had most to do with medicating the atmospheres
of the chambers, and men presided in the chemical
laboratories. The historical origin of this distinction,
they thought, was on the one hand the development
of the acuteness of smell in male animals at rutting
time, and on the other the power in dams of recognis-
ing their own offspring by licking it with the tongue.
And it was a well-known maxim in their medical
families that every individual had a distinctive odour
and taste. They could tell one man from another in
the dark, and even at a considerable distance; and to
touch him with the tongue was to make assurance
doubly sure. The kissing that was so common in the
West as a symbol of friendship and love, like the rub-
bing of noses amongst less civilised peoples, had as its
origin and basis the recognition of the individual by
the taste or smell. They did not need so close or ma-
terial an investigation of the individual to have pleasant
memories of friendship aroused. Their methods and
symbols of companionship and love had become more
and more spiritual with the passion itself.

But, preternaturally acute though their senses
seemed to me to be, they would rely upon their de-
cisions no more than the modern scientist of the West
would rely upon his. Error, they held, was ever
maiming the conclusions from reports of the senses,
and they took every precaution in recording or using
their own perceptions. Accurate though their sense-
memory was, they had instruments which kept a per-
manent record of any report of the senses they meant
to use again. Not merely sounds and sights did they
automatically record, but perfumes, and flavours, and
electric impressions. Ages before, the inasan or re-
corder of light and the linasan or recorder of sound had

My Education Continued 267

been brought to a high pitch of perfection; all the
colours and forms seen in nature, at whatever distance,
could be kept in permanence on irelium-plates and re-
produced to the eye by the insertion of the plates in the
inasan and the reversal of the instrument. So was it
with sounds, however loud or faint; the linasan would
tell out to the ear music or speeches recorded hundreds
of years before down to the minutest tone. By a modi-
fication of these two instruments they took record of
the inner structure of things even at cosmic distances,
and of sounds which seemed to be intercepted by vast
material obstructions. The development of the re-
corders of the other senses had been more recent; not
till perfumes and tastes and electricity had begun to
enter largely into education and the stimulance of
memory did the necessity for such instruments arise.
In the earlier times before the purgation of the race
these instruments would have been a temptation to
new and epicurean vices. Now they were nothing if
not educational aids. The farosan or aromagraph
enabled the gardeners to arrange the mnemonic har-
monies of flowers as mere sense-memory could never
have done; it could reproduce any subtle perfume or
mixture of perfumes that had ever been experienced in
the island. The salosan or gustagraph gave incalcul-
able aid to the chemical and alimentary families; with-
out its permanencies of flavour they would have fallen
into daily errors in mingling the atmospheres of the
halls of sustenance and medication and those of Ilarime.
By its aid they could recall any of the tastes which
had made substances or compounds pleasing to the
palate. But it was the idrosan or electrograph that
was most needed; for the firla or electric sense had
been so recently developed that its reports as to the

268 Limanora

amount and quality of any electric impulse were most
untrustworthy. Without the aid of this recorder they
could never have compared the electric impulses of the
past with those of the present, nor could they have
been so accurate in measuring the electric powers of
various substances.

They knew that the basis of all scientific advance
was accurate measurement. Their old measuring in-
struments had gradually been overtaken by their own
senses, and had to be replaced by others more and more
refined. In order to make sure that their senses in-
troduced no personal element into the reports and re-
presentations of their various delicate measurers, they
had invented an instrument which for fine adjustment
surpassed all of these. It was the airolan or senso-
meter, and by it the medical families in their weekly
review of every system in the community were enabled
to find the exact personal equation of each. It re-
corded the upper and lower limit of the various sens-
ations, the limit of endurance, and the vanishing
point. Although there was a great evenness in the
development of the senses in the community, there
was yet considerable variation in the delicacy of per-
ception. One man was keenest in .sight, another in
hearing, a third in the electric sense, yet there was a
certain constancy or proportion in all the senses of
every man, a proportion varying according to well-as-
certained laws with the hour and the season, the man's
age, and the temperature and health of his body. The
airolan tested, measured, and recorded the regular vari-
ations of each Limanoran's senses, and thus he was
able to know how far he judged accurately anything
he perceived. By its aid he was able to know the exact
point at which he would need to call in any one of the

OF : >^

ft UNJV

My Education Continued 269
.

various mechanical aids to the senses, the magnifiers,
or modifiers, or distance-reducers. By its means they
were able to gauge the proper mixture of colours and
proper size in architecture that would please at certain
distances. By its means, too, they could accurately
measure the distance from which any electric or lumin-
ous or somniferous impulse had come, when it struck
on the senses.

It was one of the commonplaces of their policy that
whatever could be done by machinery it was waste of
skill and energy to do by human labour and thought;
and instruments were generally more exact and reliable
than the senses and active powers of man, however
delicately developed and refined. Of course man's brain
and hand must still guide and superintend all instru-
ments and machinery, but his interference with their
automatic working was reduced to a minimum, in order
that the discount for personal equation should be as
little as possible. It was not, however, so much for
the sake of accuracy of result that mechanism was
substituted for human work, as for the sake of progress.
Every operation and function which could be performed
mechanically it was a slur upon human dignity to do;
and at once Limanoran humanity was relieved from
the necessity, and the freed energy was applied to other
and nobler efforts towards progress.

During my education I had noticed again and again
with surprise that mathematics took no part in it. Not
once had I heard the subject mentioned by any of my
guides or companions. I remembered the important
place it held in Western curriculums, and wondered
how the various scientific families could manage their
abstruse formulae and calculations without that science.
A people that laid so much stress on exactitude of

270 Limanora

research as an essential of all scientific progress were
surely lax to a degree in failing to train their youth in
the various branches of mathematics.

On having my senses tested by the airolan, the
thought came uppermost in my mind again; and my
proparents at last took notice of it, perhaps as the time
had arrived for enlightening me on the subject. They
led me to a vast museum-like building, crammed with
all kinds of small and intricate machines, not unlike a
kind of patent office, where the models of new inven-
tions are deposited for examination and comparison.
There was evident in the arrangement a careful classi-
fication according to elaboration and delicacy. In the
first section we entered there were- the simplest of ma-
chines, having a few levers and cog-wheels, and a few
keys set in a keyboard; these were meant for the easier
rules of calculation, — addition, subtraction, multiplica-
tion, and division. We tested most of them and I
saw that they were infallibly accurate; never once
even in the longest and most intricate calculation was
there any error. In fact, these machines had been
first invented to avoid the constant errors that vitiated
important results when novices were set to work them
out. It was then found that not only did they rid
calculations of fallibility and the youth of heartless
drudgery, but they enabled the race to advance more
rapidly. They set free years of life, especially in the
formative stage, that had been wasted on mere routine
and mechanical work; and, best of all, they allowed
the tissues of young brains to be less rigid. It was
noted that, after the calculating machines were set
to work, the youth grew in mental and especially in im-
aginative power at twice the old rate. The elders of
the state were amazed at the result, prizing as they

My Education Continued 271

had done the effect of arithmetic in the discipline and
education of the young; indeed, it had been with
great regret that they saw the youth relieved of so
disciplinary an exercise; and they even thought of
making an exception to their usual utilitarian state-
principle, and training the boys and girls in rapid cal-
culation, although it would be of so little use to them
in their after-lives. But a few years convinced them
of the serious mistake they had made. The pace of
development so suddenly and greatly quickened in the
new generation that the result could be set down to
nothing else than the new freedom from calculations.
Their own faculties and imagination seemed stiff and
almost ossified compared to the ease and flexibility of
those of their sons and daughters. Invention and dis-
covery struck out with unprecedented energy, and the
ethical and emotional phase of imagination grew at a
marvellous pace; new ideal realms were opened out for
morality and practical thought.

The experience threw a remarkable light upon a
phenomenon which had puzzled them for generations.
After the period of youth the members of the com-
munity had to specialise; and for some undiscoverable
reason those who devoted themselves to mathematics
and the working of abstruse formulae had been found,
able though most of them were, to be the most rigidly
unreasonable in the community ; they refused to admit
that they could be mistaken in any of their judgments
or even opinions; nothing would move them, — neither
logical argument nor emotional appeal; they assumed
that they had found absolute truth, and refused to
have compromise. In one generation in the far past
the mathematical families had to be exiled, so serious
an obstruction had they become to progress. Again

272 Limanora

they had been completely renewed, children of the
most noble-minded, freest, and most imaginative fami-
lies being substituted for the old members, and trained
to fulfil their functions; within a generation the result
was the same; these scions of the finest of the race
became as narrow-minded and obstructive as their pre-
decessors had been. It seemed to be useless to change
the stock, and for some generations the community ac-
cepted their conservatism and obstinacy as inevitable;
they grew accustomed to smiling at the mathematical
families as " the omniscients."

Why the true cause of this degeneracy had not oc-
curred to such a shrewd and logical people it is hard
to say; probably because they were so wedded by long
tradition and practice to the idea that mathematics was
one of the loftiest of sciences and one of the most es-
sential elements in education. They doubtless refused
to reconsider its claims or to abandon their inherited
reverence for it. But the discovery of the effect of
the calculative habit on the tissues of the brain at last
forced them to face the true cause of the infallibility of
the mathematical families. It was their occupation
that caused their degeneracy. Men began to pity them
for the slavery in which they had been so long held
and to devise means for their liberating. The old
habitual smile at the mention of their name became
sadness at the thought of what these members of the
race might have accomplished for its civilisation had
they not been so frozen in their tissues by the perpetual
use of formulae. They were amazed at their own dul-
ness in failing to see that men who dealt in such me-
chanical methods and exact results could not but be
mechanical themselves and easily fall into the fixed
mental attitude of the omniscient, and dealing with a

My Education Continued 273

world so unreal in its stiff, skeleton-like outlines could
not but fail in a world of conditions and compromises.

At first the prevailing idea was that all the studies
and sciences needing exactitude of formulae and result
should be neglected by the community. On considera-
tion it was felt that some of the most valuable stepping-
stones to the loftier ideals of the future would be
sacrificed if this were done. The other alternative was
chosen. The inventors who had made the calculating
machines were set on to find instruments which would
accomplish what the mathematicians had had to do for
the community. And, one after the other, the years
had produced them. Even differential and integral
calculus had been superseded by a series of machines
that with little guidance worked out all the applications
of their intricate formulae to the sciences. As we ad-
vanced from department to department we watched
these machines at work confirming the imaginative re-
sults of the physicists, the chemists, and the astronom-
ers. The mathematical families were relieved of their
duties and distributed, and every member of the scien-
tific families was taught to use all these formulating
instruments. Their brain-energy was not monopolised
by calculations; the use of the machines was but a
routine detail in their wider intellectual life, and ab-
sorbed so little of their energy that it seemed to have
no effect on their faculties.

I was not many days in mastering the details of the
formula-machines; for I had paid some attention to
mathematics in my buried life and the memory of the
subject rapidly revived. I soon came to see the wisdom
of the lyimanorans in eliminating the study from their
scheme of education. It would have been the height
of extravagance to waste long periods of their lives in

18

274 Limanora

studying and doing what a machine could do better.
It was exactly the kind of work best done by a ma-
chine, for it had to do with a world rid of all conditions
and, mathematically speaking, perfect. The inventors
were still busy making new and simpler machines for
the use of the scientists; and, though they had to know
the new mathematical formulae needed, they busied
their brains rather with their practical application and
with the machinery that would use them. It was
imagination in the practice of mechanics rather than
the mechanical use of methods and formulae that they
were engaged on. Hence it was that they avoided
the old unpracticality of the mathematical families, and
stood in no danger of thinking themselves infallible
and the only treasuries of absolute truth.

One of the most interesting departments of Minella,
as this great building was called, was that which con-
tained the measurers of time. I was somewhat sur-
prised that this department should exist, for I had
admired every day the power the L,imanorans had of
telling to a minute fraction the passage of time. Their
sense of time seemed to me to make watches and clocks
superfluous. Even when the sky was clouded over
and no heavenly body or light to be perceived, they
could tell the exact fraction of the day or night that
had passed, as I tested again and again by the watch I
had brought with me. Their knowledge of the natural
signs of the time of day or year had become instinctive
and automatic through long centuries of daily use.
The position and state of the petals of flowers would
at any moment by day or night, by shine or cloud, re-
veal to them the time. So would the temperature of
anything they touched, or, if it were highly contractile,
its size. But these external signs were quite unneces-

My Education Continued 275

sary. They had not to go beyond the sensations of
their own bodies to tell the time or season. They knew
by the intensity of the magnetism in them, by the
acuteness of their senses, by the amount of energy
they could command.

But their experiments needed far more exactness
than even their senses could afford. Time had to be
counted in their science not by mere seconds, but by
the hundred-thousandth, or even the millionth, part
of a second. One old-fashioned measurer of time was
based on the length of a wave of sound as it passed
through a vessel of water. The length of the vessel
contained a round number of nioltas (their smallest
measure of length, perhaps about the millionth part of
an inch); the vibration in the water reflected a bright
light through a microscope and camera combined ; and a
photograph of the pulsations imprinted itself on a strip
of irelium that kept moving with lightning swiftness
across the focus; this strip was divided into minute
sections, each of them corresponding to a lenta or mil-
lionth part of a second and numbered in order up to a
million. A newer clock had its principle based on the
length of a wave of light in a vacuum. Another and
more convenient clock, or rather watch, consisted of
an electric battery that kept a light irelium tongue
vibrating; this latter controlled a graduated mechan-
ism which pointed out on a face the exact lenta in the
time of day that it was. It was small enough to be
carried about on the person like a watch.

A similar microscopic minuteness of division appeared
in all their weights and measures. They could weigh
in their balances down to the million-millionth part of
an ounce. So with their measurement of heat and
cold; their thermometers couW test ten thousand times

276 Limanora

the range of temperature that their senses could bear,
although their power of endurance of fire and frost was
to me something miraculous; their furnaces were able
to volatilise the most refractory of metals and earths;
they could reproduce the conditions of the most glow-
ing suns, and also the temperature of the coldest
interstellar space, which, age by age, they were bring-
ing their frames gradually to bear with the aid of cer-
tain foods and combinations of elements. Thus did
they hope in some future age to subsist, even when
they ventured outside of the atmosphere of the earth.

All their measures were based on the decimal system,
the fundamental unit for microscopic measurements
being the amount of energy in an atom of one of their
elements, and that for cosmic measurements the energy
that would bring a beam of light from the sun's surface
to the earth's. They were able to see at a glance the
exact amount of energy in any phenomenon, to what-
ever sense it might appeal, and in their minds there
was ever a common measure for all types of force.
Their electrometers and magnetometers told not merely
the amount of electricity or magnetism in any machine,
material, or phenomenon, but the motive-power it would
have when applied to any purpose. They could com-
pare at a glance, without any elaborate calculations,
the advantages to be obtained from any substance when
using it as a force, whether through the electricity or
the heat or the gravitational power to be obtained from
it.

Especially useful was this common measure in deal-
ing with the power of light as separate from that of
heat. It was of great importance to them to know the
exact amount of energy even in a beam of light which
their eyes could not perceive. For they used sunshine

My Education Continued 277

as one of their great curative agencies, and the medical
families were constantly experimenting on the effect of
more or less light upon the microscopic life existing in
and around the human body. One of their own new
developments had been the consciousness of light all
over their skin; they could tell with eyes shut whether
it was the light of sun, stars, or moon, or an artificial
light which was falling on any part of their body; the
effect, even on the mind, differed completely in the four;
the sunlight, or at least a certain amount of it, gave
exhilaration or even joy; the starshine brought con-
templative melancholy; the moonbeam mildly stirred
the passions; whilst artificial light varied. in its power
of exhausting brain and nerve energy with the material
or element that produced it.

Sunlight deprived of the intensity of its heat was to
them one of the essentials of life. Its bactericidal
power had been scientifically proved ages before, and a
family had been set apart for testing its effects both
qualitatively and quantitatively. It was not merely a
loose knowledge that they had acquired of the anti-
septic influence of sunshine. They had measured ex-
actly its power of depriving microbes of their deadliness
in the case of every disease; and they knew to a nicety
how strong or weak it would be needed in order to
check their ravages in any constitution, whether con-
centrated on a spot or diluted and spread as in a bath,
how long daily its application would be required, and
how many days. It was this family that superintended
the sunbaths in their halls of medication, and assisted
the medical sages in advising as to their use. It was
true that daylight, and especially that of a sunny day,
swept one third of the noxious life out of all water open
to its influence, whilst the rays of the sun bleached

278 ^Limanora

most bacteria of their pestiferous tendency. Yet used
indiscriminately sunshine became itself unwholesome,
because of the other forms of energy besides light that
it brought with it from the sun and the intervening
spaces. If not used with caution, it would destroy the
microscopic allies of human life in the body, rendering
feeble the phagocytes that devour the virulent microbes;
it would by its great heat injure the delicate tissues
of the brain, and by its magnetism and weight press
heavily on the nerves and the circulation. It was the
duty of the solometric family to rid it of its unwholesome
elements, and to indicate the exact amount and use of
it that would be beneficial in every state of the body.
Another of the duties of this family was to cultivate
colonies of microbes of the various diseases and make
them harmless by means of sunlight for use in inocula-
tions against their own unmodified bacterial kin. One
of their greatest aids in this process was the use of the
water of the sea; wherever it did not kill the bacteria
completely, it emphasised the bleaching power of sun-
light over them and rendered them the allies of the
human system in its struggle against all disease and
decay. This sterilisation of disease was one of the
most important functions of the family. It was they
who led the flight-gambols of the Limanorans into the
outer fringe of the atmosphere, where they might drink
in the elixir of unadulterated sunshine; their guidance
and contrivances were needed even there, in order to
prevent the action of the other energies in the light
growing deleterious. Even moonlight and starshine
had their uses in the hands of this skilled family. They
could separate the deadly or poisonous elements of
moonbeams to help them in destroying bacterial life,
and leave only their healthy and inspiring tendencies;

My Education Continued 279

thus dealt with, the rays of the moon gave a stimulus
to the brain-tissues which worked up imaginative ma-
terials. And every star had, in their science, its own
peculiar influence, sometimes malign, more commonly
beneficial, when treated according to their wise dis-
coveries.

Little of all this would have been possible without
the inolan or measurer of light, one of the most delicate
instruments they possessed. This was but a modifica-
tion of the human eye as it had been developed in their
bodies. It magnified the impression made on the lens
so that it should move a small mirror delicately hung
in vacua; the reflection of this mirror ran along a
graduated scale on which it recorded by bleaching a
point of colour, the energy of light in the beam pro-
ducing the movement. This recorded not merely the
strength of the rays of which their eyes were conscious,
but that of many octaves of light outside of the range
of all human eyes. A more modern and delicate
form of the inolan used a microscopic camera as the
medium of measurement; this had accomplished new
wonders in the way of measuring the power of rays from
stars out of reach of the human eye. A third photometer,
recently invented and still untested when I visited the
collection of measurers, had made use of electricity in
collecting and testing the quality and energy of beams
of light.

In all of these forms of the inolan there was an ar-
rangement for ridding each ray of its heat and of other
forms of energy before it entered the lens ; a thermometer
measured the heat; and the other elements were ab-
sorbed and analysed by a subsidiary apparatus as the
beam approached the inolan. Another modification of
the apparatus had a prismatic arrangement attached to

280 Limanora

it, not unlike their inamar, and this broke up the beam
of light into its colour components; the inolan measured
each separate component, the length of its wave, and
the energy required to produce it, its camera also re-
cording in photographic form the metallic elements
through which the beam had passed. A more recent
modification, promising great results, was one which
by means of a vacuum-lens recorded the dark beams
that shone from unseen stellar bodies through the
corona of our own or other suns. When fully de-
veloped they expected this to reveal the secrets of the
darker depths of the heavens; the systems revolving
round the stars would stand out clearly with all their
elements for the investigation of the astronomic
families.

Nor did the extraordinary refinement of these instru-
ments, that were constantly being discovered, interfere
in any way with the development of Limanoran senses.
On the contrary they stimulated advance. Every new
aid to any sense pointed the way to its improvement;
and in a few years or generations this aid was rendered
almost superfluous and a new and more delicate ma-
chine must be invented; for the combination of so
many functions in the living body rendered the ob-
servations of any one sense less exact and trustworthy
than those of a machine which had but one purpose.

Thus the evolution of the senses kept up an unending
race with the evolution of fine machinery to aid them.
Even the roughest, most material, and least specialised
of all the senses, touch, had grown into something that
was most delicate in its manipulation; and one of the
most important parts of the education of my senses
was to refine and develop it. They had specialised it
to an astonishing degree. The lips, especially the

My Education Continued 281

outer edges of them, were able to distinguish the latent
energy in any substance applied to them; whilst a deli-
cate fringe of hair upon the upper lip, too minute to be
seen by ordinary eyes, revealed to them the movements
and character of gases and vapours that were so faint
in their impulse as to be unrecognisable by the other
senses. The measurement of force had been raised to
a high point of exactness in their huge chests and
shoulders. Their hands, within certain limits, felt
temperature with the accuracy and minuteness of a
thermometer. And the prehensile and manipulative
skill of their fingers far surpassed that of the ablest
European conjuror I had ever seen. Without any in-
tention to outwit my senses, they would do things
with their hands so swiftly that I could not follow the
movements. It seemed to me at first as if they had
more joints in their fingers than other human beings,
so nimble were they; but this was not the case, al-
though the arm had greater scope of movement than
mine; in fact it seemed to move in the shoulder socket
as in a universal joint, so freely could it revolve in all
directions. Their joints were really more padded with
cartilage than mine, so that there was more flexibility
in the limbs along with greater firmness and strength.
Their nerves were also more magnetic than those of
other men, conveying the messages to and from the
brain and will-centres with far more swiftness and
certitude. Indeed, if I were to find any one point in
their systems which most differentiated them from
European humanity, it was this increased and ac-
celerated nerve-energy. For a long time their rapidity
and ease of movement and action bewildered me;
whilst I was deliberating what was to be done, they
had done all that was needed. They had instruments

282 Limanora

for measuring the flash of thought from brain to hand
and of sensation from hand to brain, and when tested
at first, the swiftness of the message along my nerves
was not one tithe of theirs, but when my education had
somewhat advanced, this disparity was reduced by
half. This advance was accomplished, not merely by
practice, but by variety of diet and medication, and
by living in a more magnetic atmosphere. I was often
borne aloft into the purer air that fringes the envelope
of our earth, and there, half-asleep, I drew into my sys-
tem the electric elements which went to the quickening
of my nerves. Down in the island everything that
would excite me was avoided; the muscles and the
other tissues of the body were exercised, whilst the
nerves completely rested. Then they would be given
gentle exercise of their own, to strengthen and make
them supple, without unduly stimulating them. I soon
began to feel the difference in the increasing nimble-
ness of my limbs and could move with more celerity
and ease. The fingers were quicker to follow the eye.
I grew what my old companions would have thought
unerring in my aim and would have made a deadly
shot with bullet or arrow in the wars of my native
country. What was still better, the tips of my fingers
came to be powerfully magnetic both in their apprecia-
tion of the electricity in any body they touched, and
in actively producing magnetic currents. I was even
able to cause a faint flash in the darkness by concen-
trating my will-power in my fingers, and waving them
in the air.

POSTSCRIPT TO UMANORA

WHEN he had reached this point in his narrative,
a striking instance of the result of his educa-
tion occurred. It was getting towards the end of win-
ter, and we who had our rules of thumb for the changes
in the weather were looking for the equinoctial gales
that harbinger the approach of spring. The days were
lengthening, and the light of the sun was growing clear
and strong upon our high-perched huts.

We had noticed a certain distraction in his manner,
an absence of thought or of consciousness, when he
was describing the development of his magnetic sense.
And when he ceased for the night he could not rest
but paced uneasily along our platform of cliff which
overlooked the waters of the sound. The moon had
begun to wane, and our weather lore bade us look out
for storms at the beginning of her next phase. I could
not go myself to rest for thinking of his strange nar-
rative and the wonderful people he had sojourned
amongst. I sat up many hours writing out what I
could remember of his conversations and descriptions
while it was still clear in my mind.

Some time after midnight I looked out and saw the
silver moonshine on the still waters below and was at-
tracted by the beauty of the scene. I had thought
that he had retired, but I had scarcely seated myself

283

284 Limanora

on a projecting boss of rock that took in one of our
widest views, when his musical voice startled me out
of my reverie.

We fell into such sympathetic intercourse as the
beauty of night often stimulates in two sleepless spirits
meeting under the moon. He told me that the earth
was then tremulous with suppressed passion, and that
far off in his old home in the Pacific her heart was
about to break. He felt waves of magnetic feeling
pass through him, and they drew his soul back to
Limanora. He knew that the spirits he loved there
were yearning for him. For his heart quivered and
throbbed with full memories of all he had known and
experienced. There was anguish in the magnetic un-
dulance vibrating across his being. It was not merely
that a great storm was approaching; that he had
known for some days. There were human pulsations
in the ether which beat like an ocean upon his brain.
That was why he could not rest. If only he could
have his wings again, he would try to respond to the
call. But it was useless with the recrudescence of his
muddier humanity to attempt return by such aerial
means. I offered to go with him on the morrow to the
nearest city and charter a ship to carry us to his former
home. But he would not listen to my proposal, and
bade me seek rest and sleep.

I began to feel that I was intruding on the privacy
of an agonised soul, and I bade him good- night and left
him to his own thoughts.

The exhaustion of overcharged emotion soon let me
drift into troubled unconsciousness. Dream followed
dream like hurrying clouds over the moon. At dawn
I woke in nightmare. The hut was shaking. I thought
that I was still dreaming. But the swish of the rain

Postscript to Limanora 285

and the lashing of the tree-branches on the roof soon
made me understand. The calm of the night before
had given way to tempest; and the earth was suffering
rupture.

I remembered the prediction of our guest, and rushed
to his hut. He was not there; nor could I conjecture
whither he had gone. I thought he had taken shelter
in the bush from the storm. Three days it lasted, and
then we were able to go out and search the drenched
forest. We followed up every track that he had been
accustomed to take. We went to all his favourite
haunts. But no trace could we find of him, though
days were spent on the search. Then we forced our
way through the dense undergrowth in several direc-
tions we had never seen him take; and at last we came
upon a yawning chasm, which had every appearance
of being newly opened. The precipitous side of the
mountain had split, and a vast landslip had swept
down it and filled the bottom of the gulf. We could
not resist the natural conclusion; this was the tomb of
our guest. After all his wanderings he had found
appropriate resting-place. The earth he knew so well
had taken him to her bosom.

BOOK II

The Limanorans
The Inner Life of a Self-Selected People

287

CONTENTS

PREFACE

GLOSSARY ....

I.— DISCOVERIES ....

II — AN ACCIDENT ....

III.— DEATH

IV.— AN EPIDEMIC ....

V.— LITERATURE ....

VI.— INSPIRATION ....

VII. — PIONEERING ....

VIII.— ANOTHER THREAT .

IX.— POWTY

X.— THE MANORA AND THE IMANORA

XI.— ETHICS

XII.— A WARNING ....
XIII.— REWGION ....
XIV.— THE LAST FLIGHT .
EPILOGUE

PAGE
29I

295
299

339
354
392
407
419
436
487
507
538
554
629

654
694
707

289

PREFACE

LATE in the autumn, when the memory of the
stranger who had told us so many wonderful
things had begun to lose its sharpness and we had
almost ceased to talk of him, we were startled by his
re-appearance.

We were in our tunnels, taking advantage of the dry
weather to get piles of our wash dirt out ready for sluic-
ing in the wet season, and were working till nightfall.
On a still, fair evening, which reminded me of the night
he vanished, we were returning jaded from our long
work and had just issued from the belt of bush that
fringed our clearing when the moon rose above the
peaks on the other side of the fiord and flashed a shuttle
of gold across the waters. Raising our eyes to our
huts, we stopped thunderstruck. Was that but a lunar
effect on the throne-like cliff in front of them? It
could not be a spirit; we had never heard of ghosts in
these new lands, nor could the belief in them seize hold
of minds so accustomed as ours were to deal with the
rougher and more material elements of nature. We
shook off our trance, and stepped forward. The sound
of our footsteps made the figure move and as he turned
in the moonlight we recognised our lost friend (his
apparition, we first supposed). But he rose with his
old quiet and dignified salute of welcome, and joining

291

292 Limanora

us as we sat at our evening meal, we talked as if he
had parted with us only that morning. We had not
the hardihood to ask him what had become of him
these long months. But I noticed that he had more
of his old semi-transparency of tissue and ethereality of
hue, and in his eyes, as he ceased from talking, there
was a baffled look I had never seen before in them.
He would lapse more frequently into deep reverie. He
seemed to have gone through a lifetime of effort and
suffering, and his spirit was, I could see, weary and
sore within him.

He shrank at first from all reference to his life within
the circle of mist out on the Pacific. It seemed now
to be a painful memory. There was a pathos in his
tone as he spoke far keener than I had noted in it be-
fore. But gradually I drew him into reminiscence of
it when we were alone in the bush, and he seemed after
a time to find consolation in thinking and speaking
about it, especially when he talked of the spiritual side
of the civilisation in the midst of which he had lived
for so many years.

In the long nights of that last winter he resumed his
narrative again. He seemed to have difficulty in find-
ing English expression for what he had to tell, but I
encouraged him in our wanderings around the fiord to
repeat and interpret and explain what he had told
us. Gradually the narrative found a more intelligible
language, and I was able to jot down notes that I
understood. I have done my best to throw them to-
gether into the form that they ultimately found in his
story as he told it to us sitting together in our hut.
But I am still puzzled and sometimes confused by many
of the ideas and feel that they have baffled my best
skill to put them into our tongue. Some of his de-

Preface 293

scriptions awakened in us a sense of incredulity, and
others shook our old world of beliefs to its foundations.
But we were drawn to him by the noble and ingenuous
way in which he told us all; indeed, were often fasci-
nated and blinded as we listened. We could not but
accept his story as the highest truth we could hear in
this world, and yet we were struck dumb by its strange-
ness. Much of our bewilderment we attributed to the
difficulty of understanding his strange speech, and
more to our own ignorance of the intricate problems
that have troubled sages. We have kept back this
latter part of his story for a time in order that by study
and care we might make it more intelligible and more
suited to the thoughts of Christendom. But we have
to acknowledge ourselves still baffled by the impossible
task of making this road through difficult regions plain
and easy, and so have resolved to issue the narrative
with all its faults upon it.

GODFREY SWEVEN.

GLOSSARY

AII,OMO — The astrobiological families.

AiROLAN — A sensometer, or instrument for rinding the per-
sonal equation of a man.

Ai,ci,iROLAN — Radiographic cinematograph; an instrument
combining microscope, camera in vacuo, and electric
power.

AI,FARENE— Oxygen shrub.

AMMERUN — Historoscope.'

CIRAI,AISON — Museum of terrors.

CLEVAMOI,AN— Combination of telescope and makrakoust, or
distance-hearer.

CWMOI^AN— Earth-sensor.

CUROLAN — Instrument that combines electro-microscopy and
photography.

CUROLANIC — Infinitesimally microscopic.

CORFAiyEENA — Vacuum-engine car.

DOOMAI.ONA— The hill of farewells.

DUOMOVAMOI,AN -Instrument that interprets the music of the
cosmos.

ERFAI,EENA — An ti-gravitation flight-car.

FAI,EENA— Ship of the air.

FARFAI«EENA — Electric faleena.

FAROSAN — Aroma-recorder.

FIAI,UME— The valley of memories

FII,AMMU— The will- telegraph.

FIRI.A— The electric sense.

FIRI,AI,AIN — The firlamaic department of Oomalela.

FiRiyAMAi — The arts of the electric sense.

FIRI,AMAIC— Belonging to the arts of the firla.

FIRLAMAN— A musical instrument that appeals to the firla.

295

296 Limanora

FLORAMO— The botanical families.

FIX>RONAI,— The tree of life.

FRAI,OOMIAMO — The families of pioneers that imagine and

represent the distant future.
GERMABEU, — A tree with fruit that makes the muscles and

cartilage more elastic.
IDIJJMIAN— Electric steriliser.

IDRO£AN — Observer and magnifier of electric impulses.
IDROUNASAN— Machine-reporter of the thoughts and feelings

and words of a council.

IDROSAN— Recorder of electric impulses and sensations.
IDROVAMOI^AN — Instrument for at once seeing and hearing at

great distances.
IXARIME— Edifice devoted to the arts of smell, taste, and sound

combined.

IMANORA — Centennial review of the civilisation and its progress.
IMATARAN— The focnsser of history.

INAMAR — Instrument for splitting up light into its constituents.
INASAN — Recorder of luminous impressions.
INOI.AN— Measurer of light.
IREUUM- Iridescent metal applicable to all manner of purposes

by the Limanorans.
LABRAMOR— Alloy of irelium that sponges up and retains

electricity.
LABROI.AN — Instrument for drawing electricity from the air

and the clouds.

LAViDROiyAN — Camera-telescope.

LAVOI,AN— Revealer of the inner tissues and mechanism.
LENTA — The minutest division of time in Limanora.
LEOMARIE— The science and art of earth-seeing.
LEOMO — The families of earth-seers.
IvEOMORAN— The earth-perforator.

LII.AMO— The families that watch the security of the island.
IviivARAN— The storm-cone.

LII<ARIE — The science and art of island-security.
LINAMAR— The analyst of sounds.
LINASAN— Recorder and reproducer of sounds.
LINOKI^AR— Spectroscopic analyst and recorder of vapours.
LOOMIAMO — Families of pioneers who imagine and represent

the links that connect the present with the distant future.

Glossary 297

LOOMIEFA— The theatre of futurition.

MANORA — Decennial review of the progress made by the people.

MARGOL — Electric instrument for blending or reducing the
strength of perfumes, flavours, and sounds.

MINEU,A — Edifice for formula-machines.

MIRI,AN— Life-lamp for revealing and recording internal pro-
cesses for the use of the eye, the ear, and the electric sense.

MQI/TA — The Ivimanoran measure of infinitesimal length.

MONAI,AN— Electrical distance-analyst.

MORNAI.AN— Time-telescope.

NAROU,A — Dream-stimulants.

OOARAN — Psych ometer.

OOAROMO — Psych o-phy siological fam ilies.

OOI,ORA:N— The sonarchitect.

OOLOREFA— The hall of sonarchitecture.

OOMAUBFA — Halls of nutrition and medication.

OoROivAN — Instrument for transforming form and colour into
melody.

PIRAKNO— Machine for drawing electricity from space.

PIRAMO — The meteorological families.

RiMi,A — The centre of force.

SAI,OSAN— The gustagraph.

SARIFOI^AN — Instrument that interprets for sight, hearing, and
the electric sense the graphic records of the mirlan.

SARMOLAN— Cosmic barometer.

SIDRALAN— Biometer.

SIDRAI.MO— Bio-chemical families.

SIDRAMO— The chemical families.

TERRAI,ONA— The edifice of outlook into heaven and hell.

THINAMAR— Visualiser of sound.

TIRI,EOMORAN— Electric earth-perforator.

TREMOI.AN— Electric clock indicating the changes of electricity
in various parts of the island.

TREVAMOI, AN— Graduated modifier of sound.

VAMOI,AN— Makro-mikrakoust.

VIMOI.AN— Photo-electric analyser.

CHAPTER I

DISCOVERIES

WHAT I rejoiced over most of all was the growth
of my sympathetic magnetism. Not merely
was my firla or electric sense developing more satis-
factorily; but I was becoming rapidly conscious of the
impulses of the race. I no longer walked amongst this
refined people like a blind man amongst men who see.
I began to feel the enthusiasms that stirred them as
a body, like a wind across a cornfield. I seemed to
know whatsoever of public concern was occurring
without having it directly communicated to me. I re-
membered in the buried life of my boyhood and youth,
the lightning-spread of a new impulse through an as-
sembly or a crowd ; the most rational members of the
mass were unable to resist it, even though it might be
irrational or vile. How like a tornado the war-impulse
bursts through a nation is one of the commonest ob-
servations in the study of history; statesmen and kings
and heroes have to bow before it, and are swept along
with it in spite of their better judgments. And as
swift and widespread is the coward-impulse that sends
a defeated people cowering to their homes. It is this
unspoken magnetism, giving vent as it too often does
to the evil in the human heart, that makes the cause of

299

300 Limanora

progress in even civilised races so hopeless. Through
its all-leavening power success inspires and often con-
secrates the diabolic, and failure damns the noblest and
most divine.

And this it was that made progress so easy amongst
the Limanorans; it became the instrument of the high-
est elements and thoughts in them. The whole weight
of their humanity was on the side of advance, and it
was to the better future that they ever gravitated.
Everything that made for a higher plane was an in-
spiration to this people.

This personal magnetism had been developed in
them into a definite faculty of their souls. They had
recognised for many ages the close affinity of mass-in-
spiration and the power of the individual will. It was
the same energy working along the nerves, and even,
though with some dissipation, through the space inter-
vening between individualities. They had investigated
its nature, conditions, and methods of action in their
exact scientific way, and had identified it, as far at
least as its form of energy was concerned, with elec-
tricity. It was even less dependent on material con-
tact than that universal force. As they developed it
in their frames, they were able to send more and more
definite impulses through considerable distances. This
was their filainmu or will-telegraph, one of their most
remarkable faculties, drawn with deliberate purpose by
the elders of the race out of the chaos of mere vague
influence and tendency.

Though making use of the active electric sense as
channel, it was not the same as the firla, for it implied
a greater effort and outwelling of the whole spirit.
Only exceptional impulses and enthusiasms set it into
full efficiency, such impulses as entangled the whole

Discoveries 301

soul in their issue. It was no mere toy to be used for
the amusement of the passing moment; dormant it
lay, if ever summoned to such a purpose. It was the
faculty that in other races and periods of history had
set up men as heroes and leaders; not that these had
even been conscious of its existence in them when they
began their career; success and gathering enthusiasm
in their followers gave it strength and issue, till their
mere glance seemed to command. But when failure
came, and the glamour or magnetic atmosphere rarefied
about them, their faculty vanished; for it had no means
of communicating its meaning or power.

In certain periods of exaltation every Limanoran was
conscious of the filammu or will-telegraph; he could
not only receive but send emotional impulses through
long distances. The intervening air was magnetised
by their great enthusiasm or sympathy, and became
a medium for transmitting emotional or imaginative
thought from mind to mind. Not yet had they been
able to send a definite piece of information by this
means, unless it represented the spiritual crisis through
which the sender was passing. But in movements that
shook the whole race to its core, like Choktroo's threat
of invasion, even those who were still in pupillage
seemed to feel the beginnings of the faculty, at least
on its receptive side; secluded though they were far
from the scene of deliberation, they knew the magni-
tude of the danger that threatened the life of the com-
monweal ; the air seemed to tingle with it, and their
embryonic filammu could not help responding to the
vibration. Once awakened they were eager to bring
out its latent power, that they might feel and know the
impulses which sped the race onwards as .a whole.
They soon discovered that it ceased to grow or even

302 Limanora

work except under certain conditions; they must keep
step with the people, and fix their eyes steadily on the
future: they must never swerve from uprightness or
candour, never let the perfect transparency of their
lives be clouded.

Such had been the conditions of the development of
the filammu in the race. In fact its indications had be-
come unmistakable as soon as candour and truth had
become the primary virtues, and progress the watch-
word. And it grew as the ideal of the nation became
clearer and more imperative, and their character more
uniformly strong and noble. They also found that
something depended on the physical conditions; the
atmosphere must be free from all impurity, and the
body must be supremely healthy, whilst the magnetism
of the will must have free course along the nerves.
As my nature clarified under their training and my
spirit grew more at one with the purpose of the race, I
grew more sure of the stirrings of the filammu within
me. At first its indications might be explained by
other and more patent causes; I had been in an atti-
tude of expectancy, or my reason had been following
up certain trains of thought from previous events. But
after a time there came to me thrills of emotion that
were out of the range of my immediate surroundings
and thoughts. I followed them out and found that
they originated far from the locality in which I was
working at the time.

Once a sudden tremor passed through my system as
of some great fear; I had not been thinking of any-
thing but the work before me; no cloud had come over
my sky; no danger that I knew of threatened. As I
was trying to explain the emotion, it suddenly passed

Discoveries 303

into longing to see Thyriel. I knew where she had
gone that day and my work had almost reached a
finish, so I adjusted a faleena, and flew quickly over
the country in her direction. I soon knew why I had
come. She was pinioned by a huge rock that had just
tumbled from Lilaroina. Happily only her wings had
been caught, but they had been caught in such a way
that she was wedged tightly between them and could
not free her arms and legs nor move her hands; and
the boulder was too large for her to heave up by the
strength of her body, even when magnetised by her
will. When she saw this, she withdrew the magnetism
from the effort, and turned it in its full power into her
filammu as she thought of me. I was not long in dis-
entangling her wings from their prison. But, before I
was done, her family were beside us; they too had ex-
perienced the thrill, though more feebly than I had
and at a greater distance.

Another time I had not seen Thyriel for some days;
we were both busy at our own pursuits in different
parts of the island. She, as I learned afterwards, had
been set to account for a new and somewhat peculiar
odour that had recently begun to accompany the issue
of vapour from a distant lava- well. I was engaged in
timing a new and intermittent disturbance on the sur-
face of the sea off the eastern shore, and trying to find
whether it had any relationship to an intermittent
fumarole which had recently broken out on the eastern
slope of Lilaroma. I had kept watch for several days,
and could find no synchronism in their periods, al-
though I was convinced that there was a close connec-
tion between them, if there was not a common cause.
I was feeling baffled and somewhat downcast; when
suddenly there sprang up in me a sense of elation, if not

304 Limanora

of triumph, which continued for the rest of the day, al-
though I still failed to discover the connection between
the two phenomena. When I set out next day for the
scene of my observations, I was joined by Thyriel, who
explained that she had finished her task the day before
and had now been detailed to assist me in mine. I
then knew the cause of my thrill of joy, and told her
of it. She had at that very hour not only discovered
the source of the fumes in a new mineral that the
leomoran had touched, but found that this new deposit
was extraordinarily generative of electricity. It was
this that had made her heart leap for joy and go out
towards me. She had longed for my sympathy in her
rejoicing, and unconsciously her filammu had energised
in my direction. Between us we soon saw that there
was a complicated periodicity in the alternations of my
two phenomena; it needed several days' observation
to catch the rhythm, and for that reason I had been
baffled at first. Before long I discovered the cause;
as soon as a lava- well farther north had ceased to flow,
they also ceased; it was the viscous intermittance of its
stream opening and then closing two apertures below
tide-line into the subterraneous fires that had regulated
the rhythm of these new vents; the break in the lava-
current, the rise and fall of the tide, and the rush of the
breakers had made it complex. And the lava had
finally closed both before it had ceased to flow.

It was at the same period that the whole race breasted
back the darkness. There came at times in their his-
tory an age of exceptional advance, that made the pre-
ceding era seem almost stationary. Nor had they yet
been able to explain its appearance satisfactorily It
was easy enough to say that such and such exceptional

Discoveries 3°5

men lived then, and that they produced the phe-
nomenon. But that was only reasoning in a circle;
they were as much a product of the time as their fel-
lows; whence did they get the inspiration which spurred
them on, or the plastic material in which they could
work? They would have been nothing without their
conditions and circumstances. They surprised them-
selves with their powers and successes, as they strode
forth into the primeval darkness and illuminated it.
It all appeared very simple when once accomplished.
They had been gazing for generations into the dark-
ness, where now there was a blaze of light.

An imaginative pioneering book had long ago sug-
gested that the impulse came from outside the round of
the earth. And one of the most brilliant discoveries
of this newest period of advance was a scientific proof of
this hypothesis. The great development of the filammu
or will-telegraph had made it easy, by localising the
new thrill of expectation, and revealing that it came
from no terrene source. Out of what seemed the pro-
found inane such inspirations issued, and if they found
a soil prepared for them by long self-denial and patient
outlook and industrious collection of materials, they
fertilised the period into exceptional efflorescence and
fruition. Many an impulse comes out of the blue and
falls unavailing in that no nation or race or period is
fit to receive it. The profound inane, they came to see,
was one of the falsest of ideas ; because no matter patent
to the human sight fills it, the interstellar space was
believed to be the wilderness of the universe, cold,
bleak, inhospitable, lifeless. Now it was felt to be the
home of all supersensuous life, crowded with an energy
that needed no stellar matter or atmosphere to sup-
port it, that never appealed to any but the highest

306 Limanora

and latest- developed senses of man. The Limanoran
couriers out on the verge of the earth's atmosphere
had been the first to feel this new flash that lit up such
a vast region of the infinite darkness; they came back
inspired with new resolution and made the first of the«
discoveries; they gave a magnetism to their fellow-
workers in the same line, and soon the leaven spread
through the whole people. The fervour of originality
became the order of the day. To decipher the un-
known handwritings on the wall of life, to solve its
hardest problems, to make new inventions and dis-
coveries, to push out into the darkness that surrounds
the world, — these became the ambitions of all.

Nor did the filammu of any in the island fail to thrill
to the influence. Thyriel felt before I did that there
was something exceptional in the atmosphere. But
even my will-telegraph seemed to respond. I longed
to go out and conquer the unknown, to outpace the
slow movements of human discovery. At first I thought
the impulse had come from Thyriel, and then from my
proparents or my teachers. And so it was with every
Limanoran; his first thought ran to his closest friend
as the source of the magnetic thrill. But after much
consultation and report, the conclusion appeared that
no one in the island had originated the impulse, that
all in the air had felt it simultaneously in their filam-
mus, and after them all down in the island had felt it
simultaneously. The truth gradually forced itself home
on the investigating families that the magnetic vibra-
tion had had its source far beyond the limits of the
earth; for they knew that from no other country or
race upon the surface of the globe could it have come.

Ages before, they had abandoned the belief in what
seemed supra-terrene influence as unscientific and lead-

Discoveries 3°7

ing to superstition. Faith had been in the past so often
the cue and basis of the worst of tyrannies, the inspira-
tion of the grossest immoralities and irrationalities, the
impulse to most retrogression. It had also, it is true,
been the nurse of gentle and just spirits. But it made
them so timid that they were afraid to go forward ; it
wound round the soul such a network of fears and
observances that its life was useless to the race. As
soon as the final purgation of the people had been ac-
complished, it was found that every citizen ceased to
speak of faith, or to use it as the basis of any work or
practical step. They did not thrust it out by any pub-
lic act, nor consciously reject it, they only left off giv-
ing weight to any of its commands or suggestions; not
that they might not be true or on the side of all that
was best ; but that it had so often discredited its au-
thority by prompting, or allowing itself to be used
as the pretext for, retrogression or baseness. They
preferred to take every step in life on ground made
sure by investigation and proof that appealed to reason.
And here they were again on the limits of the un-
known and vague. This sense that was closest to the
portal of the soul, their filammu, had brought them to
face an intelligence that came they knew not whence,
and to stand in the presence of an infinite darkness
that flashed out at times the lightning of noble impulse.
They were by no means unwilling to listen to its re-
port, but gladly received it as a sure and trustworthy
revelation; however dim the region into which it was
about to lead them, they were eager to follow, if only
they set each step upon solid fact. If there was any-
thing unverifiable in this new leading, they would soon
be done with it. It now became one of the duties
of the astrobiological families to watch for these

308 Limanora

extraterrene vibrations of the will-telegraph, and to
investigate the circumstances and conditions.

These families had been the first to feel the new im-
petus to discovery, for they were the couriers who
went out to the borders of the atmosphere and watched
for signs of energy and life in the infinite beyond.
Again and again, had they brought back specimens of
microscopic and attenuated life, which seemed to float
in interstellar space. Again and again had they ana-
lysed the beams of light shooting through it, but with-
out much result. Now they were to be rewarded for
their patience. They had taken out with them one of
the new faleenas made of transparent and colourless
irelium like glass; and as an experiment they sent it
up by means of electricity far above themselves. As it
rose above the limit of the earth's atmosphere, they
saw all over its surface a strange fluorescence, which
grew unearthly in its beauty and brilliance. Rainbow
colours played through its texture as if they were
threads thrown by the shuttle of some hand out of
heaven. Its wings moved at lightning pace, and yet
soon it began to fall towards the earth. Again it
struck upwards, and again the prismatic weavings gave
it more brilliant life. They watched it as it rose and
fell between the denser and the rarer medium. And
when finally they caught it and brought it down to
earth, upon its wings both within and without there
was imprinted, not the iridescent web that had been
weaving over it, but a hieroglyph of faint, half-distin-
guishable forms, some familiar, some strange, inex-
tricably mingled.

They investigated the phenomenon, and came to the
conclusion that the faleena, in the comparative vacuum
which lies on the borders of our atmosphere, had acted

Discoveries 309

with its electric motors like the lavolan, one of their
medical instruments for the inspection of the inner
tisues, whilst the wings acted like the films of a photo-
graphic apparatus, and retained a shadowed impress of
the inner structure of all the beings or forms coming
between them and the body of the car. A new world
was opened up to them beyond even their electric sense.
Outside of the denser envelope of our orb the rarefaction
of space meant no longer lifeless desolation traversed
only by beams of light, electric impulses from other
worlds, and the flight of occasional meteors. Now
they knew that there were ethereal beings living in in-
finite space, and that their inner structure differed in
density from their enveloping material. Some of this
life was manifestly minute and attenuated, unsuited to
the medium in which it floated, waiting for some fit orb
to land on. But under their powerful clirolans it was as
clear that there were highly developed organisms fitted
to this element in which they swam, organisms prob-
ably higher than any to be found on the earth, yet too
ethereal and shadowy to touch any of even the latest-
evolved senses of the L,imanorans.

What possibilities this glimpse into the vast unknown
opened up for them they shrank for a time from im-
agining, lest they should again enslave themselves to
superstition and absurd fancy. For astrobiology they
saw at a glance there was begun a new and lofty career.
Soon would they modify and improve the lavolan to fit
the conditions of interstellar space, and the faleena, if
not their own organs, for venturing far into the rarest
ether. And then what reports, what pictures of the in-
visible universes would they bring before the eyes and
the firlas of their fellow-islanders! How would they
ever have time to investigate and classify the genera

Limanora

and species that inhabited the ether? What limit was
there to the ambitions and ideals they would be able to
set before the race ?

Another investigation that followed from this dis-
covery had as its object the nature of the new forms of
energy that evidently filled interstellar space. This
was the province of the families devoted to astro-
physics. They produced apparatus for isolating each
type of energy which seemed to have full action only in
a vacuum, and they experimented with it in an innu-
merable variety of ways so as to find out its character-
istics. The force of gravitation had been familiar to
them even in primitive ages, and had long been investi-
gated so as to reveal many of the qualities of its action
that were unperceived by ordinary senses. Electricity
had been one of the commonest of their phenomena, and
recently a vast unknown region had been opened up by
them, lying between the verge of eye-awakening light
and the verge of firla-awakening electricity which their
machines had made plain even to untrained senses.
For generations they had passed with ease in their in-
amars or spectroscopes beyond the bands of colour that
affected their eye, and the unseen rays had yielded most
of their secrets to them. In their lavolans or vacuum-
energy mirrors they had traced the characteristics of
the torrents of energy which tore away from the nega-
tive pole of their batteries. And now they had to face
a new form of radiant energy, the product of these
negative streams and of the irelium which they struck.
Experimenting with it in their lavolans they found it
different from its parent energy; by passing through
the irelium it had grown indifferent to the power of
magnetism. This peculiarity enabled them to investi-
gate the inner nature of magnetism; for on the two

Discoveries 311

sides of an irelium sheet they had the same electric rays
acting differently towards a magnet; on the one side
they could be deflected by it, on the other they went on
their way as if it were not there. The difference was
also used in producing a new kind of electric motor,
governed by an irelium film which closed or opened a
channel of magnetic influence. A third useful applica-
tion of the discovery was a new irelium-covering for
the head and the body, that milked the east wind of its
deleterious qualities. And a fourth was an apparatus
for finding by the aid of a magnet the stuff of irelium
with greater certainty in their lava-wells.

But the discoveries that flowed from this were still
more important. By further experimentation they
found another type of radiant energy that behaved in a
similar way towards gravitation. In a vacuum formed
within a vessel of an alloy of irelium it ceased to obey
the force of gravity; but as soon as it had passed
through the side of the vessel, it gave full heed to the
force. Within a few months after this had been dis-
covered, there had been invented a faleena that fell or
rose according as the new rays were intercepted by a
film of the irelium-alloy or were allowed free passage
in vacua. The energy in mass drove the car on indif-
ferent to the earth's influence, or at the will of the guide
brought the erfaleena, as they called it, gently sloping
downwards at any angle required to the surface of the
globe. A pioneering book at once developed the re-
sults of this discovery and invention. It showed how a
way was now opened to other stars. For this new
radiant energy was found to stream in and past the
earth's atmosphere in vast currents. The denser the
medium, the more was it absorbed and lost, so that in
the earth and the atmosphere it seldom or never mani-

3 1 2 Limanora

fested itself. Hence the long ages of scientific investi-
gation before it was discovered. By means of these
currents, which evidently set through space in definite
directions, they would be able to guide their new anti-
gravitation faleena to any point in the interstellar
ether, and be able to keep up the supply of force that
would drive it. And when they approached a new
world they could by means of their new machinery
bring its force of gravitation to bear on the car and so
hasten its flight; and they would be able to hover over
the atmosphere by means of the alternating movements
of their engine, till they could find out its conditions,
and see whether it would be safe to land on it or not.
What they wanted yet was the evolution of their phys-
ical system in the direction of living in ether or in
various atmospheres indifferently. It pointed out to
the physiological families the way that would lead in
this direction; and it showed how, though it would
take countless ages, it was yet within the scope of
their humanity.

For their knowledge of the constitution of the uni-
verse the discovery of these two forms of radiant energy
proved to be of great importance. They were able to
find out the relationships of gravitation, electricity, the
dark rays of the inamar, the negative rays of the lavo-
Ian, light,- heat, and the two new types of energy.
And by means of the similarities and differences found
to exist between any two of them they were enabled to
resolve the molecules of any element into their, con-
stituent atoms, and thus to reveal the characteristics
of the fundamental ether. They felt that they were at
last in the immediate presence of the medium which
filled space, and they invented an apparatus isolating
the ether from all the forms it enters into, so that it

Discoveries 313

became manifest under their magnifiers to several of
their senses. In it they were able to make any one of
the forms of energy move and play. From it they
were able to mould many of the terrene forms of latent
energy, and they hoped to mould most of the others
with which they were familiar.

One of the most immediately practical results that
came from the discovery of these two modes of energy
was another kind of engine, which almost doubled their
store of force in Rimla. The main form of it took ad-
vantage of the radiant energy that showed indifference
or obedience to gravitation according as it played in a
vacuum or through an alloy of irelium into the air.
The new rays lifted a piston in vacuot and by an auto-
matic arrangement they passed through a film of the
alloy and then allowed gravitation to pull them and the
piston with them back into its first position ; the rapid
alternations drove magnetic machinery which produced
and stored up electricity. Another form of the new en-
gine used the difference between the conduct the other
newly discovered radiant energy displayed towards
magnets when it played in a vacuum vessel of irelium,
and when it had issued through the vessel's filmy side.

The increase and concentration of force in their island
was one of the great subordinate aims of their civilisa-
tion. For they knew that the greater the power they
had command of the more rapidly could they advance
towards higher and higher goals. Greater force meant
greater dominion over nature and her secrets and laws;
and this implied accelerated speed in progress. It had
been one of the primitive blunders of their civilisation,
as it still was of all other civilisations, to imagine that
extended empire over men meant a true development
of humanity; wide sovereignty was mere artificial

314 Limanora

change of the locality and application of the forces of
mankind, without increasing them; it was but a re-
shuffling of the cards (to use your similes), with all the
honours in one hand instead of being distributed over
all; it was merely political and not real. Any gain
that might come from the concentration of power and
wealth was wasted on increased war-material and mili-
tary expeditions for retaining or subduing territories
and peoples, on futile and routine administration, and
on growth of court splendour and luxury. The pur-
suit of the sanguinary phantom of power over other
men had to be for ever abandoned before any real human
advance could be made. Empire over the powers of
nature was the primary condition of full development
of human possibilities, and every tissue of their won-
derful brains was strained to its utmost for the rapid
extension of this sway. A new addition to the stores
of the centre of for.ce, a new source of energy, was
therefore ever hailed by them as the warranty of a
leap upward and onward into the future.

The invention of these new engines, then, had no
slight significance as events in their history. And the
assurance of more and more rapid progress was in-
creased by a discovery of the chemic families in the
same direction. They had used coal for the generation
of heat before they had left their primeval home around
the south pole. But in their more tropical archipelago
they found no coal-beds, the islands having originated
in volcanic and coral formation ; and the climate made
the use of such a concentrated fuel unnecessary; it was
warm even in winter, and it supplied fruits and cereals
which needed little cooking. The forests of the islands
had furnished whatever fuel had been required for
hundreds of generations, and outside of L,imanora they

Discoveries 3X5

were still sufficient for all purposes. But the centre of
force had recalled the great heat they used to have
from coal, and the Leomo, in their probings of the
earth, had ever been on the outlook for beds of the old
fuel. Recently they had found thin strata of it, but so
deep in the earth that it was of little value to them.

But a discovery by the Sidramo, or chemic families,
made them reconsider this decision and try to invent
some form of the leomoran, which would cut and send
with ease to the surface of the earth the coal they had
found. The Sidramo had experimented with it in
various lines. They had made the steam from it give
power as they had seen it give power to the Daydream
and her Broolyian imitations. But so large a propor-
tion of the latent energy in it had been lost in the
process that they turned their researches in other
directions. Before long the)T found that, when the
coal was placed in a chemical solution containing com-
paratively common and cheap elements, electric power
was largely generated. And following up their dis-
covery the Sidramo were soon able to draw electricity
from any of the rocks of the island. Once having had
their attention applied to such problems, they made a
number of them surrender their secret; by surround-
ing one common rock, e. g. , with a certain solution they
brought from it heat alone. But the discovery most
important for the development of the race was that
which brought electric power directly from the rocks
and even from the earth. For this increased the pos-
sible store of force in Rimla enormously. And there
was no limit to what they might use there for the ad-
vancement of civilisation.

Within a few days of this discovery the Piramo or
meteorological families had applied the lavolan to one

316 Limanora

of their long-unsolved problems, the extraction of mag-
netic power in large quantities from the air. They
had been already able to draw from the thunder-clouds
their electricity, and make them pass harmless. And
by means of personal effort and the magnetism of the
body they were able when high up in the rarer regions
of the atmosphere to recharge their little shoulder-en-
gines for driving their wings. But in the lower air
they had failed to draw electricity from any but thun-
der-clouds in any quantity. They based a new appar-
atus called pirakno on the lavolan and its discoveries,
and with this they were able to draw magnetism from
even the gentlest breeze. They increased its size and
capacity, and soon could give a daily supply of new
power to the centre of force. Nor did this deprive the
air of the island of its exhilarant quality; for the more
they took from it, the more seemed to flow in from
surrounding space. But, when the east wind blew,
they found the inflow of magnetism too much for their
smaller piraknos; only the larger could cope with it;
and then the store of power in Rimla received enormous
additions.

For ages they had been testing the amount of mag-
netism in the air at various heights and temperatures
and various times of day, month, and year, and record-
ing the results of their investigations. They were now
able to decide from these and from their experiences of
the pirakno that irregular changes in the weather were
due chiefly to magnetic influence. They saw that the
tremendous storms which every few years swept the
earth had their origin in exceptional inflows of cosmic
magnetism. During the history of man since he had
come to self-consciousness and to the habit of recording
his own movements, there had been many sudden and

Discoveries 317

temporary climatic changes, that had led to vast dis-
placements of the inhabitants of the earth. A series of
severe winters in the north and in the temperate zone
would strip the trees and fields of all frugiferous quali-
ties, and drive the animals of the chase away to the
south in search of food. And the races of man had to
follow them. So in the tropics a series of droughts
would destroy half the chances of life, and exterminate
one-third of the dwellers inland. As a rule the agony
there led to no displacement of nations, so passive and
fatalistic are they by nature near the equator; but in
times when some new religious idea had broken the
spell of fatalism, the first goad of starvation drove
hordes to search for food in other zones. Oftentimes
there has been a simultaneity in the meteorological
severity, partly due to a universal influx of interstellar
magnetism, but still more to the fact that the earth and
the planetary system to which it belongs have swung
into a region of space that is exceptionally, barren of all
life-impetus. At such periods came those wide-spread
migrations of the dwellers on the globe that made new
eras in history. It was one of those cosmic disturb-
ances of climate that sent the Arabs out of their deserts,
a flaming portent along the shores of the Mediterranean
with their newly reformed religion, the creed of Ma-
homet, and at the same moment flung the Saxons
against the northern frontier of Charlemagne's empire,
and the Danes on the coast of Britain. So, earlier, in
the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era, the
Huns burst from the east like a torrent, and again and
again swept all before them in the west, whilst simul-
taneously the Goths broke in from the north across the
boundaries of the Roman empire. Later, in the ninth
century, . the Danes and Normans broke away from the

318 Limanora

north again and again, and plagued Europe with their
piratical energy in the very period when the Magyars
were migrating from the east to the west. And it
was only the closer packing of the continents, and the
consequent military organisation of European nations
that checked these displacements in later centuries,
though there were refluxes towards the east, as in the
crusades. But the cosmic meteorology of the earth
took different effect in the same direction, when plagues
mowed down their millions of victims from east to
west; where wide-spread displacements are impossible,
there must be decimation by some cosmic means in
order to let the light into the overpopulated regions.
Another escape- valve was found for the pressure of
those periods of temporary climatic change, when the
western peoples were driven over the oceans to find a
home. Emigration then came to mean transference
of masses across the sea, at first to America, where
there were other but weaker civilisations to be over-
come, afterwards to lands and islands that were either
empty or occupied by a few scattered savages. It was
their circle of mist that saved the archipelago of Rial-
laro from the effect of these vast displacements of popu-
lation. When every acre of land on the earth shall
have been filled with its complement, and human fore-
thought and ingenuity are still unequal to the sudden
changes of cosmic meteorology, then famine and plague
will be the only means of relieving the pressure.

The L,imanorans had no fear of such effects in their
own island, except indirectly. For they had complete
command of their own birth-rate and death-rate, and
kept the numbers commensurate with all the purposes
of their existence. Climate was to them as plastic as
any material or force of nature, and the unexpected in

Discoveries 319

meteorology was gradually becoming unknown. But
they had a strong indirect interest in all inbursts of
the cosmic. For the peoples of the other islands, the
descendants of their ancient exiles, were as ready vic-
tims as ever to what seemed the caprices of the seasons
and the years. And the frustration of the consequent
movements involving the interests of the L,imanorans
absorbed more of their time and reserve energy than
they desired. A violent tornado would obliterate the
products of a year over the whole archipelago, and the
fear of starvation would goad the inhabitants into ex-
peditions in search of food, sometimes even towards the
isle of devils. Again, hungry microbes, the spawn of
some pi ague- stricken world, would float into the earth's
atmosphere and find new soil on the islands; and the
dwellers would die so quickly that there was no time
or room on their circles of earth for sepulture. Into
the sea the festering dead would be thrown by the thou-
sand, each bearing its myriad germs of contagion; the
very fish that fed on them would die of the plague and
bear its microbes to every shore; the currents and the
winds, if left to their own bent, would sweep down the
foul nests of contagion on the L,imanorans; and it
would take them weeks of superhuman effort to pre-
vent the bacterial spawn from settling in their systems,
and to cleanse the adjacent seas of all taint. The effort
to prevent these disasters often wasted their store of
force and checked their advance. It seemed to them
therefore more economical of their energy to help in
dispelling the original evil or making it swerve towards
other oceans. For a time they considered it to the in-
terests of their progress to save the whole archipelago
from the irruptions of interstellar magnetism or bac-
terial life. But even this was found to have serious

320 Limanora

disadvantages. Unbroken prosperity surcharged the
leaders of the other islands with conceit, and made
them lose their fear of the central isle and resume their
projects for its conquest; or it deluged them with popu-
lation, which, whenever nature grew economical again,
was driven to foreign means for its sustenance, and, at
•times, goaded by hunger, made in military wise for the
isle of devils.

Yet these alarms and dangers were more infrequent
and more easily repelled than when the more ambitious
of the archipelago were driven by the spur of famine
and disaster to incursion. And, though for a brief
period the Li ma nor an s allowed an occasional tornado
or plague to devastate the islands of hostile neighbours,
they came to the conclusion that it needed less of their
energy to repel an occasional hive of enemies im-
pelled by narrowing limits or the lessening generosity
of nature than to beat off vast bodies of embattled peo-
ples frantic with hunger and reckless of life, led by the
keenest skill and fieriest ambition of the archipelago.
They could better avoid all destruction of life in the
one case than in the other, — one of the duties of their
civilisation, even though a subsidiary one.

The Piramo were thus essential to the progress of the
race; their growing knowledge of the conditions that
governed the climate as well as the passing weather
saved in a day as much power as the use of such an in-
strument as the pirakno at first could add to Rimla in
a year. And the scene of the labours of the Piramo
was every year more and more extended to the extra-
terrene; meteorology became in its investigatory and
experimental department more and more cosmic, and
often overlapped astronomy, astrobiology, and astro-
physics, and aided them; more and more did they find

Discoveries 321

their problems questions of magnetism or electricity.
In the interstellar spaces must be sought the sources of
the greater disturbances of season and climate and the
pirakno grew every year of more and more importance,
as they traced the magnetic influences around the earth
back into the infinite fields of space.

About this very time they invented an instrument of
great delicacy, which foretold the vaster tracts of mag-
netism into which the earth was swinging, and meas-
ured the increase. It depended for its principle and
basis on the intimate relationship between electricity
and light, on the effect of magnetism upon light and
upon electric radiation from the negative pole in a
vacuum. They had noticed for some time that the
light from any meteor or luminous body outside the
sphere of influence of the earth never reached the in-
struments of the observers on the edge of the atmos-
phere quite true, and that the aberration differed at
different times. By means of various experiments they
came to the conclusion that the aberration was due to
magnetism in the extra-terrene spaces. Their new in-
strument, which they called a sarmolan, they sent out
into the ether beyond the earth's atmosphere and be-
yond the influence of terrestrial magnetism; and, as it
received beams of light from any one heavenly body
towards which it had been directed, it recorded the
amount of this body's deflection from the straight
course. They preferred to turn it to the moon or to
Venus or Mars; for then they were sure that the de-
flecting masses of magnetism lay within immediate
range of the earth. This sarmolan turned out to be
for cosmic changes of climate what the barometer is for
daily or hourly changes of weather. Whenever it re-
corded violent deflection, it meant that the earth was

322 Limanora

approaching an exceptionally vast tract of magnetic in-
fluence, and that there would be great and frequent dis-
turbances for months, if not for years, in the regularity
of the earth's seasons and climates, or at least of those
of one zone. It warned the lyimanorans to get ready
their piraknos and all other instruments they had for
drawing and imprisoning for their own use the elec-
tricity from the atmosphere and the spaces above it. It
was in short their cosmic barometer foretelling changes
in climate years ahead. It eased the minds of the Pi-
ramo and set free half their energies for other investi-
gations, as soon as it had proved itself a true prophet.
Later improvements in it measured the distance of the
supermagnetised region of space from the earth, and
thus indicated the exact year and sometimes even the
month and the day when the series of climatic perturb-
ations were likely to begin. What had been guess-
work before, made just before meeting the phenomenon
itself, was how reduced to predictive law; and they
looked forward to the time when by recording, classify-
ing, and mapping the variations and regions of cosmic
magnetism they would be able to get at the cause of its
unequal distribution in interstellar space. Nay, when
they had charted the great drifts and currents of varied
energy that the earth encountered as its universe
swung through space, they might have ready for their
future voyagers to other worlds a full cosmography,
which would instruct them in the kind of oceans and
torrents they would have to breast, the types of energy
they would have to accustom their systems to, and all
the risks and dangers they would have to meet. And,
when their knowledge of the conditions and regions
and tracks in the boundless space they might have to
traverse was fairly rounded and complete, then some

Discoveries 323

slight adaptation of their sarmolan would be to them
their cosmic compass.

There was evidence in other discoveries too that this
hope was not so Utopian as it seemed at first, that at
least not countless centuries would pass before they
might be able to fulfil it. One especially, that of the
Floramo or botanical families, quickened their expecta-
tion far beyond the mere flight of fancy. It was a new
sublimation of a vegetable extract, which seemed to
give their lungs free play when there was little or no
air to breathe. They had used for ages the fruit of
. what they called the floronal or tree of life for giving
new vigour to the organs and especially to the nerve-
tissues; they still continued to use it, even though the
chemical families had analysed it and found all its con-
stituents, and then reproduced a mixture that had
most of the revivifying qualities of the fruit. The tree
grew only in marshy 'districts, and they had reserved
an obscure and rarely visited corner of the island for its
culture and for the culture of plants and trees like it.
There was another tree growing only in the cooler zone
half-way up the mountain, and preferring shallow and
poor soil to root in, whose fruit gave extreme flexibility
to the more muscular and cartilaginous tissues, and
especially to those in the chest; if taken inwardly or
through the pores, muscular exercise became more
easy, and breathing became deeper and slower or
quicker as the will directed. A third low plant or
shrub, which grew only on the highest altitudes of
L,ilaroma, and had its roots generally in the soil under-
neath a layer of snow, had been found recently to have
in its tissues, and in a concentrated form in its nuts,
great stores of oxygen. For ages it had been consid-
ered a poisonous plant, and avoided; for within a con-

324 Limanora

siderable radius of it breathing had always been more
difficult than at a distance from it; it had therefore
been eradicated from all parts of the cone frequented
by the Limanorans. It had no beauty of form, often
grew low like a lichen or moss, and could remain under
the snow for years without perishing. It had thus
been neglected and in fact seldom observed in its
growth; whilst its nuts had been thought to be as
poisonous as the plant itself. But recently an ava-
lanche from one of the little-visited slopes of Lilaroma
had uncovered a hollow, in which one of the Floramo
had found a bird, emaciated and unable to fly, yet still
alive; and beside it were the remains of a number of
these poison plants and particles of many of their nuts.
It had evidently been imprisoned many weeks, if not
months, and its only food had been the obscure and
offensive snow-bush, stunted, scabrous, and without
green or leaf.

The Floramo became deeply interested in the phe-
nomenon, and gathered many specimens of the shrub
from the top of the mountain. They fed the bird till
it became plump, and then shut it up in one of their
irelium vacuum-chambers with only the nuts to peck.
There they watched it from day to day, and saw that
as long as it fed on the nuts it continued vigorous and
lively, even though it began to lose its rounded out-
lines again. They soon closed their experiment, and
set the winged creature free to fly whither it would,
satisfied that there could be only one logical conclusion
with regard to the plant. They saw that its nature
was to lay up stores of oxygen in all its tissues, and
they called it alfarene or the oxygen-shrub. It was
this treasure in it that enabled it to live so long be-
neath vast accumulations of snow and ice; it was this

Discoveries 325

feature of its life that made it when open to the air so
exhaust the oxygen for yards around it that men found
it difficult to breathe beside it; it was this that, when
it became the food of the bird, enabled it to live and
breathe so long away from the air. It was the outcome
of long ages of selection up in those difficult altitudes,
where nothing could live under the snow without this
power of storing up oxygen. And its nuts, too hard
and innutritions except for hunger-driven birds to at-
tack, concentrated round the seeds an extraordinary
amount of this oxygen-stuff; and by means of this,
when underneath the pressure of the snows the husk
broke, the seeds were able to support themselves and
develop into plants away from the vital air.

It was evident that these alfarene nuts were treasure-
houses of oxygen; and soon they were tried by the
Limanorans themselves when they flew into the upper
regions of the air. At first they broke the nuts into
powder, which was made into a hard but soluble paste:
a small piece of this held in the mouth till it melted
enabled them in their flights to breathe freely in rarer
altitudes than they had ever reached before. The
Floramo afterwards brought out the oxygen-storing
power of the shrub more strongly by careful cultivation
and. selection. Within a few years they made of it a
vigorous, large, and comparatively handsome tree, and
its nuts grew larger and more oxygenated, so that they
became a necessity for all flight into higher atmospheres.
More attention was also paid to the floronal or tree of
life and to the germabell or tree whose fruit produced
elasticity of the muscles and cartilage. The develop-
ment of all three in the direction in which they might
be useful to the race quickened; the energy stored up
in their fruits came to be more and more concentrated;

326 'Limanora

selection of the plants, cross - fertilisation of them,
special soil and feed for their roots, and special sur-
roundings, were all-powerful in the hands of the Flor-
amo for changing plants and trees to any purpose they
had in view. They studied the tissues and habits of
the species that they wished to adapt, not as an abstract
and merely scientific investigation, but as one of the
practical problems of their own life; they turned the
clirolan on its inner and outer tissues, as they anatom-
ised it; they watched its inner processes with the
lavolan as it grew or decayed; they chemically analysed
its sap in all its stages, and the various soils at its
roots; then they experimented with new elements in
the soil in the direction of the qualities they wished
to encourage; they tried it with various degrees and
hours of sunshine by day, and various amounts of
moisture by night, at different stages in its growth; if
they found some of the qualities that they desired in
its fruit or tissues more vigorous in some other species,
they fertilised its blossom with the pollen of this second
plant, and from the seed raised a new species, which
would fully realise their purpose. The whole of vegetal
nature was plastic in their hands. And every year saw
hundreds of new species.

The Floramo were the forerunners of the Sidramo or
chemical families, and experimented in materials and
juices and essences, which would be useful to the race
in its ever-quickening advance. Often would vegetal
nature reveal a compound that shortened some route
through the future, and the Sidramo would then ana-
lyse the product, and find the secret of its special
efficiency. The Floramo were indefatigable in that de-
partment of their work which experimented with the
application of plants and their fruits and tissues to use-

Discoveries 327

ful purposes, and every day saw some process accel-
erated by the results of their labours. In fact they
classified the vegetal world not merely according to the
structure and methods of growth and propagation, but
mainly according to the particular utility of the pro-
ducts. The one classification was more essential to
their creation of new species, the other to their dis-
covery of purposes for which new species might be
created. L,ike all their sciences, botany was nothing if
it was not creative.

Having discovered the oxygen-storing shrub, the
Floramo gave a new bent to it, applying their energies
to strengthening its vitality and its vitalising powers,
and to finding out the most convenient form in which
to use its treasured energy. Aided by the Sidramo
they were able to combine the juice of the fruits of the
floronal and the germabell with the paste of the nut of
alfarene into minute, to my eyes almost microscopic,
globules, each of which would support one of their
couriers in the ether outside of our atmosphere for sev-
eral hours. At first they lost one of the vitalising ele-
ments in securing another; and even after they had
been able to bind the three essences together in one
form, it gave air and sustenance for only a few minutes
when they tried it in a complete vacuum. But after
experimenting for many months, they were able to con-
centrate these essences under enormous pressure and
by the aid of electric stimulus into a form which would
not volatilise except in the saliva of the mouth and
under electric stimulus. They were also able to give
their globules such electric power as would utilise the
streams of magnetic energy that filled the ether. Thus
the ether-couriers found them far more strengthening
and sustaining just above the earth's atmosphere than

328 Limanora

in it. One globule lasted several hours longer in a
vacuum, and made breathing and the other vital func-
tions more easy and enjoyable. Thus was opened up to
them by this discovery a long vista of investigation.
The new type of sustenance and oxygenation was so
concentrated that the couriers into the sky could carry
with them enough to serve through months.

During the next great period of discovery the Sidramo
superseded this use of alfarene by a more rapid method of
concentrating air. As usual they followed up the steps
of the Floramo, and created what the botanical families
had found in nature. The use of great pressure in the
manufacture of the sustenant globules in their final
form suggested the track they should take; and the
immense accumulation of energy in Rimla and the
rapidly increasing faculty of concentrating it on any
point or purpose gave them the requisite power.
They came to reduce air to liquid, and finally to solid
and permanent, form. And, following up the lead of
this discovery, they applied greater and greater pres-
sures, and were at last able to transform with ease and
without danger any element into gaseous, liquid, or
solid form. They contracted the slow processes, that
in terrestrial nature covered myriads of ages, into a few
minutes or hours, and thus again multiplied indefinitely
their vast treasures of power in Rimla.

A pioneering production, the book of elemental trans-
formations, foreshadowed the discoveries to which this
would lead. Ether, it was shown, would be trans-
formed into any desired substance, as soon as its con-
stituents and formation were found out. Even modes
of motion, like sound and light and electricity, would,
with this vast expansion of the possibility of compres-
sion, and the growing power of amalgamating and con-

Discoveries 329

centrating forms of energy, come to be bottled up in
liquid or solid form for any required period. A block
of latent sound or latent light or latent electricity
would be as common as a block of ice. Another pio-
neer, the book of abbreviation of geological time,
opened up a second vista of power that the discovery
pointed out. Nature took geological ages to perform
most of her processes; but in great passions she accom-
plished as much in a few minutes. The safe imitation
of these creative and destructive paroxysms was certain
to be one of the conquests of Limanoran posterity. For
the actual concentration of power in Rimla was as no-
thing compared with what it would be in the future.
Now they were able to contract the work of years into
minutes; then would they be able to leap in one mo-
ment across geological ages. Time was the inertia of
realisation and creative power. The whole drift of
their civilisation was towards the mastery of finite
periods of time. Years were to them what minutes
had been to their ancestry; to their far posterity geo-
logical ages would be as brief as years were to them.
Swifter and more swiftly would they eliminate from
their creative processes the reluctant element of time, and
feel that they were pacing in the footsteps of eternity.
As it was, they soon put the liquefaction and solidi-
fication of the elements to countless uses. A few of
these were the cooling of their buildings by concen-
trated air, the use in the arts of its corrosive power and
of its power of rendering most metals easily plastic, its
amalgamation with other elements into an explosive
matter so destructive as to supersede the use of the
leomoran in earth-perforation, and the storage of their
faleenas with supplies for expeditions that would take
years in interstellar space.

33° Limanora

A minor use to which they put alfarene was the pro-
duction of vacuums. They had long had mechanical
air-pumps, that gave them the vacuums they needed
for their experiments. But they now found it much
easier to enclose one of these snow-stunted shrubs in
an air-tight vessel of transparent irelium, and watch it
absorb the air within the walls. The energy formerly
spent on the making of air-pumps was saved, and de-
voted to some other useful purpose.

What was still better was the continual experiment-
ation on the human system carried on by means of
these so easily accessible vacuums. The alfarene vac-
uum became the daily plaything of the Limanoran, and
he took pleasure in finding out the needs of his body in
it, and the length of time he could endure the pure
ether. It was not long before they knew every diffi--
culty they would be likely to encounter in crossing
from star to star. The minor defects of the body were
easily met after a few years' study of them by the vari-
ous scientific families. But two gave them long pause.

One was the intense cold they were sure to experi-
ence. Where there was no terrene matter or moisture
or air to retain the solar or astral heat that travelled
through space, the diffusion of the streams of thermal
energy would render any far voyaging from the earth
impracticable. The experiments to meet this difficulty
took three directions. One was physiological, — to
make the body capable of resisting as great a degree of
cold as they would be likely to encounter; this attempt
was only partially successful, and that by slow steps.
They brought themselves to live with pleasure in any
cold that could be found in or around the earth; but it
would take many centuries, perhaps geological ages, to
bring endurance up to the pitch of interstellar cold; it

Discoveries 33 1

would in fact mean such a sublimation of their bodies
as would make them like spirits. Another direction
was chemical, — to produce a regular atmosphere round
the body as it flew, so that it might retain some of the
streams of heat that swept past it; the use of the essence
of the oxygen-plant helped them in this direction to
some extent ; but the amount of it that would be needed
to keep up such an atmosphere for years, concentrate it
as much as they liked, meant so huge a cargo that none
of their winged cars would be able to bear it above the
earth. The third direction was physical, — to produce
as much heat around the body as would act as a shield
against the cold of the ether; this was the most success-
ful ; for there were such torrents of energy ever moving
through interstellar space that it merely needed its util-
isation to solve the problem. One plan, that, when
carefully developed, would ensure success, was a mag-
netic garment which would cover the whole of the body
and draw to it all the electric energy within a large
radius of it, to be transformed into heat by minute en-
gines distributed all over the envelope. Another was,
to combine the mechanical collection of electricity from
the ether and the full development of the magnetic
powers of the body. Already they had been able to
flash lightnings around them as the}7 flew through the
night; and it would need but small mechanical man-
ipulation to increase this display and to turn it into
heat. Like meteors, they would blaze across space,
wrapped in a mantle of flame.

But this difficulty in the way of flight through the
ether was but slight as against the other defect that
their systems had in common with all terrene bodies.
They could develop heat easily enough ; but how were
they to keep intact and consistent in a vacuum consti-

332 Limanora

tutions which had been developed under the pressure
of an atmosphere? How would the tissues and the
organs of their bodies adjust themselves to the absence
of atmospheric conditions? As they rose above the
clouds, they had long felt as if their limbs and even the
molecules of their bodies were without due subordina-
tion and apt to assume individual independence, even
when the spirit grew boldest and most concentrated in
its energy. Their own wings and faleenas that were
intended for upper and rarer altitudes had to be made
tougher and more elastic than for common flight close
to the earth. They had to make them at last in a
vacuum, and subject them to all the conditions that
met them in the ether. But it would take myriads of
generations, if not of geological ages, to bring their
own bodies into such a state as to bear vacuum around
them for years; and then in their terrene life with such
a new constitution they would be unable to endure so
great a pressure as that of the atmosphere near the
earth. The only contrivance that seemed feasible was
a faffaleena enclosing the traveller round, large enough
to hold alfarene supplies for the long voyage, and strong
enough to stand the pressure of an atmosphere within
it. This they might manage after some years of ex-
perimentation.

But enclosure within such a narrow space for so long
a period, without the possibility of free movement into
the ether, did not attract them; and any little accident
in their machinery or to their supplies might make
their faleena their tomb. Some other line must be
taken by investigation and invention, if stellar migra-
tion was to become a possible and desirable thing.

This line was indicated by discoveries of the Sidralmo
or bio-chemical families, and the Ooaromo or psycho-

Discoveries 333

physiological families. The Sidralmo had long been
investigating the ultimate constituents of living mat-
ter; and again and again, when seeming to be on their
track, they were baffled by the escape of some element,
and left with only the caput mortuum to analyse.
Under their clirolans too, powerful though they were,
the principle of life showed itself in many ways to their
senses, and yet evaded all attempt to isolate it. The
lavolan, which showed the inner structure of living
bodies as they lived and moved, brought them nearest
of all to the veil that hung over the secret of vitality.
Plants and stationary animal organisms allowed them
full scope for their investigations. In them they could
see the "life ebb and flow, as death approached or re-
ceded; in them they could find every material element
entering into their composition, and test with their
varied and minute meteorological apparatus all the
forms of energy which moved them; they checked
the current of life, and watched in the plant or animal
the elements and energies that remained comparatively
stable and those that deteriorated; they let it die out,
and watched the throb and struggle of the various con-
stituents and forces as they collapsed; then, when it
seemed to have surrendered all life or hope of life, they
brought it back, by their knowledge of its existence, to
the upward struggle again and no feature of the re-
turn escaped their notice; most watchful of all were
they on that dim borderland between life and death,
where dawn is sunset and sunset dawn. In every stage
were they able to isolate each strand of the thread of
life; yet the essential secret of all escaped them. Once
the organism had shrivelled into a bundle of dead fibres
or fallen to dust, no effort of theirs could give it the
throb of life again. They could reproduce every ele-

334 Limanora

meiit and tissue and fibre, and under their clirolans
place them together in the forms of life with marvel-
lous art. One thing was still wanting to make it all it
had been. They could even mimic the flow of life
through it by means of their command over the sources
of energy; but the result was only mechanical; they
had not supplied it with the never- failing spring of
vitality.

At last, during the period of this great illumination
there was thrown a beam of light on the right path for
solving this problem. One of the Sidralmo was experi-
menting on certain substances to see how they behaved
under the rays issuing from a lavolan or revealer of
inner mechanism. They were chiefly new vegetable
substances the properties of which it was his duty to
discover and tabulate. He was also mingling one or
two new minerals with the plant-products in order to
see what modification the blending would cause. One
metal had lately been found issuing from the deepest of
their lava-wells in the form of vapour; when cooled, it
had assumed a crystalline character, and acted to some
extent like a magnet; yet it was sensitive to energies
that an ordinary magnet ignored, as, for instance, the
passage of exceptional nerve-force through the human
body. Lightly hung, it quivered when near anyone
who happened to be greatly excited. But it paid no
heed to the normal currents of energy along the nerves.
There was also a species of plant recently evolved that
had shown itself singularly sensitive on the approach of
any living thing; it shrank not merely from the touch
of a hand or of any animal, but from the proximity of
life, whilst it remained unmoved when touched by any
falling leaf or stone. The experimenter had taken a
number of these plants and made of them a basket-

Discoveries 335

work, in which he hung a piece of the new magnetic
metal by a slender thread. This he placed above his
lavolan to see how the rays from it would affect, or be
affected by, the new combination of influences. There
seemed to be little or no effect, but he continued his
experiment to make sure. Through some imperfec-
tion in its walls his vacuum failed; he tried to pump
the air out again, but, this failing too, he substituted
an alfarene-vacuum which happened to be near him.
The result was most striking. The metal, lightly
hung in the basket, became agitated at once, and its
movements grew more or less active as it approached or
was drawn off from the vacuum. After a time it began
to show less sensitiveness, and at last became almost
quiescent, even though the vacuum remained efficient.
On examining the alfarene plant under a magnifier, he
found a minute slug, that had evidently escaped the
notice of the maker of the vacuum ; this had been the
source of the agitation of the metal in the basket dur-
ing its last spasmodic efforts to hold on to life; and,
when death, through the lack of air, had overcome it,
the agitation had ceased. The plant itself had by the
presence of its life kept the test from becoming com-
pletely quiescent. The influence of the life of the ex-
perimenter himself seemed to be largely neutralised by
the surrounding air; it was only when he came very
close to the test that it indicated his presence.

Here was revealed to the Sidralmo the path the}^ had
to follow; a wide vista into the darkness had been sud-
denly opened. It was not long before they had taken
full advantage of the discovery. They invented the
most helpful of all their instruments, the sidralan or
biometer; they hung the combination of life-sensitive
plant and nerve-sensitive metal itself in a vacuum,

336 Limanora

directly in the path of an electric current; the details
of its mechanism they rapidly improved till it measured
with accuracy the degree of vitality in any plant or
animal. But they soon found that it was differently
affected by vegetable and animal life. The energy of
the former moved it but slightly, and only in certain
directions; the latter seemed to surround it and agitate
it from all sides; it quivered as if with subdued excite-
ment. Yet there were degrees in both; some plants
moved it more than the most primitive unicellular ani-
mals, although the movement was less pervasive. Thus
were they well on the way towards the isolation of the
life-principle from its constant concomitants.

The biometer came to be of as much importance to
the medical superintendents as to the Sidralmo; it
abridged the labour of their weekly inspection; for it
told in a moment whether the vitality in any member
of the community had fallen or risen in degree, whether
it was below the proper average, in short whether all
his organs and tissues would have to be minutely ex-
amined for the cause, and whether his dietary scheme
would have to be revised. The psycho-physiological
families found it of some use in their investigations into
the faculties of man and their basis in his bodily consti-
tution. They found that the wiser and more intellec-
tual a personality was, the more gently he moved the
sidralan; the more of animal vitality he had, the more
violently he agitated it by his presence.

But the instrument was too rough and undiscriminat-
ing for their purposes. It could not distinguish be-
tween the purely spiritual and the purely animal except
in this loose way. They tried modifications of it, but
without success. It was the Ailomo or astrobiological
families that helped them to take the right direction.

Discoveries 337

They were constantly bringing down out of the stratum
above the atmosphere vessels full of the seeming no-
thingness that existed there, in order to investigate it
and see whether it was mere vacuum or not; and
though the contents appealed to none of their senses
but the electric, their various instruments of research
revealed different energies and a large amount of life,
besides minute forms of matter without life. On several
occasions they had noticed that the contents affected
their tests differently when the experimenter was near
and when he stood at a distance. Step by step they
separated the element that acted thus from its various
concomitants. And soon they were able to concentrate
a considerable quantity of it in a receiver exhausted of
air, and to precipitate it in powdery metallic form.

The substance was handed over to the Ooaromo, who
saw that it would supply the test they wanted; for it
was but slightly sensitive to the presence of animals,
and its sensitiveness gradually vanished as they tried
it with lower and lower species of animals; whilst it
quivered near men, less near young men and women,
only slightly near infants, but with quick tremors when
near the older and wiser Limanorans, who had suffered
and thought through long centuries. They came to
the conclusion that this residuum was the essence of
some element in the ether that responded to the energy
of the higher faculties, as the magnet responded to
electricity. They had in fact found at last a true test
of soul, that refinement of the higher animal energies
which has assumed a new grade in life, the conscious-
ness of itself, and the power of keeping its own form
and essence as an entity for ever separate from all other
beings and things.

It was not long before the Ooaromo had made from it

338 Limanora

an apparatus which would test the presence of soul and
measure its force. In this ooaran or psychometer they
were at last furnished with an instrument that would
give organic unity and new purpose to their science.
They would now be able to watch and measure the
growth of soul in the child, and the ebb and flow of
its strength in youth; and thus would they give new
vigour and life to the creative function of their science.
They had now an exact basis for education ; as guides of
parents and proparents in tuition they would walk in
the full day, where before they had groped in dim twi-
light; in every case would they be able to advise with
the same certainty as the medical elders advised on the
health of the body. For the mature men and women
would they act as true father-confessors,, and do what
the priests of so many religions pretended to do, but
did not do; they would be able to tell everyone, who
desired it, whether his soul had advanced or receded in
power after any series of sufferings and deeds, or any
line of conduct, and thus to give advice as to what
should be done or omitted in the future. And when
the elders had come near what had before seemed the
utmost limit of life, they would be able to tell them
whether their nausea of existence was only fleeting and
subjective, or whether the roots of their soul were
loosening themselves from the soil of the body.

CHAPTER II

AN ACCIDENT

BUT so vast an expansion of science and the un-
veiling of so many outlooks into the future left
no room for the thought of death. The pace of life
quickened perceptibly, and the energy of every dweller
on the island was strained to its utmost to meet the re-
quirements of the new additions to the force of the
country and of all the new inventions. It was impos-
sible to think of anything but the tasks in hand. None
had an idle thought, none a leisure moment to waste
on mere introspection or dreams.

In fact it became quite clear that the old dream-fac-
tory might be closed for a time at least. For several
generations it had been the custom of the L,imanorans
to stimulate invention and discovery by the use of
magnetism. When anyone felt his problem insoluble,
or an insuperable obstacle in the way of his advance
towards some practical goal, he had his dream-con-
sciousness awakened and quickened as he slept. A
member of the medical families would attend by his
bedside, and apply a magnetic current to the particular
point of his brain that controlled the powers concerned
in his pursuit, and especially to the parts which were
the physical expression of the imaginative faculties,

339

34° Limanora

And by day he would instruct the thinker as to what
nutritive or medicated chambers he should enter in
order to draw the main strength of his system towards
the faculties he needed. Day after day the patient
nurtured the parts of the brain and of the nervous sys-
tem that would help him to the solution; night after
night he dreamt out the terms of the problem. At last
either in day-dream or night-fancy the curtain would be
raised, and he would see the path to take; light flashed
in on him as if from another world. What in my
buried life used to be called inspiration was cultivated,
moulded, and directed with as deliberate foresight and
care as any feature of the body or the character. Nor
were these dream- stimulants ever abused; when the
purpose had been served, the goal reached, at once the
other faculties and physical parts had equal attention ;
the strain was unbent, and the symmetry and bal-
ance of the whole system restored. Never was the
stimulation of dream-consciousness permitted for a
mere pleasure or whim; the importance of the aim to
the progress of the race had to be proved before it was
granted; nay it was only problems the solution of
which would lead to extraordinary advances, that were
dealt with by narolla or dream-consciousness stimu-
lants. Now the narolla were entirely abandoned; for
imagination was preternaturally excited, and discovery
and invention seemed to come to investigators almost
without effort.

It was indeed a period of accelerated progress, if not
of precipitance, in the work of all families. The dark-
ness around existence lifted over the whole horizon,
and demanded redoubled exertion, in order that the
new regions should be mapped before it fell. The
tissues and nerves of every L,imanoran felt the stimu-

An Accident 341

lus; each worked with a will. Still the necessities of
the situation almost ran ahead of their powers. One
thing became clear, that they must have more workers;
the new generation would have to be more numerous
than the last. For the young had to be drawn upon for
active nerve- and head-work before their usual time;
and these would need more leisure in the next stage of
their life to compensate for the loss of it in the period
of growth.

It grew evident that parents who had been excep-
tionally successful in the two children they had brought
forth, reared, and launched full-fledged on the career
of life should be permitted and stimulated to resume
parentage. It was considered one of the highest privi-
leges and honours to be selected as parents again by
the magnetic consciousness of the nation. There was
needed no formal agreement or resolution; the mind of
the race was known without consulting it openly; and
every pair felt in a moment that they were selected for
reparentage; they required no stimulation, no permis-
sion to enter on the patriotic duty. And all considered
it a duty of the loftiest kind. Passion in the race
burned low; no longer was it a sting or goad that had
to be mastered; it was in short no more a passion, such
as the use of imagination, the love of the race, or the
yearning after advance had become. The animal ele-
ment in it had grown insignificant, and left it at the
bidding of intellect and will. These tried parents had
thus no sensuous pleasure to seek in the new task as-
signed to them. They took it upon them as a duty,
and their chief pleasure lay in the honour they had
been paid, and in the service they were doing to the
race and to the progress of their humanity.

A second necessity of the new position was earlier

342 Limanora

marriage on the part of the men and women of the
community. As soon as bare maturity had been
reached, pairing now began. First it had to be scien-
tifically ascertained that all the merely primitive
stages of mankind had been passed through, not only
the prehistoric, but the historical. It would be one of
the greatest of evils to allow the privilege of parenting
for the community to any who might have yet to go
through a stage of individual life that represented cent-
uries of the past of mankind. Little better would this
be than stocking their island with children from their
exiles. It was a question of testing every individual;
for some passed more rapidly through the life of their
ancestry than others; and these were not always the
best as parents or even as citizens. Every tissue and
faculty had to be tested, after careful study of the
records of the childhood and youth. No possible pro-
spect or chance of atavistic taint was overlooked.

The next duty was to review the needs of the race.
The tasks and abilities of every family were measured,
and the possible expansions of these were estimated;
then new sciences, or new divisions of sciences, or new
duties that would need the services of a family or
families specially selected and moulded for the purpose,
were taken into the account. From this elaborate re-
view of the resources and needs of the population con-
clusions were carefully drawn as to the number and
quality of the children that were required. The pro-
blem was easy enough as far as mere extensions of the
existing families were concerned. But the creation of
new types was a question that tasked the abilities of
the wisest to the utmost. The special faculties needed
for the new science or art or duty had to be discussed
and decided; and especially how far existing faculties

An Accident 343

would have to be modified or newly combined. Then
out of the various families those two had to be chosen,
a cross which would produce the required modifica-
tion or combination. But, as this was still largely of
the nature of experiment, more than one effort was
made towards each new type, in order that, if one child
failed, the others might be available. But the wise
creators of new types were rapidly getting surer of their
ground; their experiments were growing less of experi-
ments; they could almost foretell to a faculty or tissue
the result of the crossing of any two families. And
where any quality was unequal to the new duty, first
creative surgery was called in to modify or add to the
tissue of that part of the brain which was the physical
equivalent of the faculty, and afterwards education with
its various magnetic and dietary aids was brought to
bear on its development. Yet there might be some
chance of their new type falling short of its purpose
and, to guard against this, several individuals of it
were brought forth and trained. It was generally
found that all of them were needed to carry out the
duties of the new position.

After everything had been settled in the programme
of the next generation, the task of matching began.
Time after time the two who were to be the parents of
the new type were thrown together as if by accident
in circumstances and surroundings which would touch
their imaginations and rouse their enthusiasm for each
other. They were put into difficult positions together,
so that one might help to extricate the other from
them. Alternate debt and service wove mutual bonds
around them, till at last neither desired to issue from
the network of obligation and love in which they were
caught. The magnetism of one was complementary to

344 Limanora

that of the other; and when separated they longed to
see each other. With none in the community was the
filammu of either in such communion as with the loved
mate. Thus partly wise choice, and partly spontaneity,
produced the match. The lifelong bond could never
become enslaving for either; for the material of it had
been selected not by mere youthful caprice, but by the
maturest wisdom of the race, whilst it was spun by
the impulse and will of the two friends themselves.
Neither the state nor either of the partners could pos-
sibly regret the friendship, or wish it dissolved. It
passed as naturally into marriage as flower into fruit.

But, whilst the future was thus being safeguarded,
the new duties or expanded duties had to be looked
after. Seventy-five years of work had to be provided
for before the new citizens could be made fit for their
duties. Part of this was covered by drawing earlier on
the powers of the new generation; the youth must come
out of their seclusion a few years sooner than usual.
But that was not sufficient. What way was there out
of the difficulty? It was a tacit rule of the community
that none were to overstrain their energies; overwork
was considered as great a vice as indolence; for it
cheated the race of some of its advance by demoralising
the faculties and tissues, and bringing on the nausea
of life earlier than it should come by nature. The
biometer was carefully applied to every citizen in order
to test how far he could go in work without wasting
his energies. And after all had been assigned addi-
tional work to their utmost limit, there was still so
much unassigned. The only chance of meeting it was
the extension of life. The elders must live longer.
Happily every condition was now present for managing
this. They had new foods and agents for revitalising

An Accident 345

the tissues; they had new apparatus for discovering in-
ternal defects in the human system, and new methods
of remedying them; the far vistas opened up into the
future gave a new purpose to the life even of the most
aged ; they longed to see what would come of all the
expanded invention and discovery; the enthusiasm of
the new age fired the imagination of the oldest. Lima-
noran life had another century added to it.

In the midst of the bustle of these preparations for
the future (if anything the Limanorans did could be
called bustle), there occurred an accident that smote
them almost with dismay, and brought them as near as
I had ever seen them approach to melancholy. The
additions to the sources of the energy available in
Rimla had entailed more muscular work as well as
more superintendence, and it was necessary to assign
more physical toil to the now-earlier mature than had
been customary. Two scions of the meteorological
families, who had been selected for marriage and par-
entage, were sent to manage a large pirakno, which
had been constructed for drawing the magnetism from
the air- and the spaces just beyond the atmosphere.
The great machine had been placed on an isolated spur
of Lilaroma, so that if ever through the sudden sweep-
ing of the earth into a supermagnetised area it should
become dangerous, it could easily be detached from
Rimla and insulated. And there were never less than
two beside it to help in its management.

The younger men and women took the night watches
in all the physical labour that had to be undertaken.
And Tamarna and Omirlo, as one of the youngest and
least experienced of the pairs that had to manage this
huge pirakno, kept the last watch of the night, the
watch that included sunrise and was followed by that

346 Limanora

of two of the most mature workers. It was thought
that, as every lyimanoran would be awake and on the
alert at dawn, help in any emergency could easily be
procured. As it was well known that during that
period there was a great increase of magnetism in the
atmosphere, provision was made in the machine itself
for so regular a change; it was so arranged that, when
the sun's rays first touched it, it should automatically
increase its capacity for magnetism. But so recent had
been the development of cosmic magnetography that
the times and seasons of the irregular increase of mag-
netism had not been tabulated and classified. Had the
observations been made for a long enough time to allow
of inferring a uniformity or law, then it would have
been seen that these supermagnetised spaces, though
they may have been entered by the earth during the
night, have little effect upon her atmosphere till day
dawns; the excess of magnetism seems to lie dormant
in the dark; the first rays of the sun act like a fuse to
a mine and complete the circuit between extra-terrene
space and the surface of the earth. Sunrise, in fact, as
they came afterwards to see, was the most critical time
for such a machine as the pirakno.

It happened, too, that on this particular night the
sarmolan or cosmic barometer had been getting out of
order; but its watchers did not think it called for im-
mediate attention; the morning would be time enough
to put it right. Its indicator thus lay tongue-tied and
misleading, when it should have been violently agi-
tated. Tamarna and Omirlo had no warning of the
approaching magnetic tornado. The hour before dawn
the pirakno moved as regularly and quietly as at that
point of the night when the magnetic tide is at its
lowest ebb, the point when sleep is deepest and death is

An Accident 347

most frequent. They had just seen that every part
was moving without friction and fully coping with its
work; and Omirlo felt that he could leave his mate for
a brief space and consult the sarmolan- watchers. He
had been gone but a few minutes when he heard a loud
crash behind him, and at the same moment he noticed
that the first beams of the sun had struck across the
levels of the sea. He turned and saw a flash from the
place where, he thought, the pirakno stood. Flying
back in trepidation, he found the machine as he had
left it, but it had stopped. At first he could not see
Tamarna; but on searching he saw her form lying on
the ground close to the pirakno, hidden by one of its
cranks. He touched her temples and left side, and
saw that life had fled. The crank had come upon her
as she lay, and bruised her body; the sight of this
completed his despair; he felt that the last hope of her
recall had vanished.

Yet he knew how much the medical elders could do,
and there arose in his mind a flicker of hope. He
wasted no time on lamentation, for there moved in him
the carefully trained consciousness that all such aban-
donment to emotion was an offence against the progress
of the race. They considered that every occurrence of
life demanded as much concentration of energy and
thought as a shipwreck, or the incidents of a battle, or
anything that we in the West would call an alarming
emergency. As grief or despair or fear used up the
power that should be spent on action, emotion was
strictly reined in at such a moment; the instinct was to
call the whole resources of the nature to action.

Omirlo braced himself to the emergency, and sent
the whole of the magnetism he was capable of into his
will-telegraph. After a few minutes' exercise of it, it

348 Limanora

seemed to relax, and he knew that he had roused his
parents to the danger. Recalling his energies to
Tamarna, he followed the few simple rules that he had
been taught for the recovery of the seeming dead. He
made her lungs and heart imitate the play of life; he
switched the magnetism of his own system on to hers.
But after all his efforts she lay still inert when his
parents arrived. They decided to carry her at once to
the medical elders, for they saw that something excep-
tional had occurred; it was not a swoon, or even death
from the bruise dealt by the pirakno. So they took
her wings, and making them by means of soft leafage
into a couch for her, they bore her through the air
swiftly, but just as she had lain when found. Tam-
arna's own parents met them on the way, and helped
them to accelerate their pace with her; and within less
than ten minutes after -the accident she was in the
hands of the sages in the mountain hospital.

The general medical house was Oomalefa. But
there were two houses of cure which approached more
nearly to what our hospitals are. One was far up the
slopes of L,ilaroma, not much beneath the winter-line of
snow. The other was aerial and movable, and was,
whenever it was needed, floated upwards to the margin
of our atmosphere, where parasitic and microscopic life
was reduced to unaggressive feebleness. In it were all
the necessities of life at hand; the temperature was kept
close to summer heat; and there were lines of communi-
cation, so thin as to be almost invisible in the air, con-
necting it with the halls of sustenance and medication.
This hospital was meant for the invalid who was strong
enough to be moved up from solid earth; and, as soon
as one had been brought back far enough from the
grasp of death to bear the rareity of the upper air

An Accident 349

where it merged into the ether, he was taken up in it.
But Tamarna was first borne to the mountain hospital,
where the instruments of investigation and cure were
ready. When she should have had all the ruptures of
her bones and organs and tissues set for mending, and
all the tissues that were crushed beyond mending re-
placed by freshly manufactured tissues, and when she
was seen to hold on to life with a tenacious grasp again,
then would she be borne into the hospital of accelera-
tive healing high above the clouds.

The biometer recorded the faint presence of life; the
spirit had not yet escaped, and before long it grew
manifest to ordinary eyes. They had apparatus for
stirring any organ of the body into activity; and with
the lavolan they soon saw which of Tamarna' s functions
had been deranged and had suffered syncope. It was
her heart that had ceased action; the inrush of mag-
netism from space drawn by the pirakno, without pro-
vision for storing it or letting it pass harmless, had
paralysed some of the more important cardiac tissues
and the circulation was in many places clogged, whilst
a large proportion of the superficial blood-vessels had
been ruptured by the fall of the crank upon the body.
A Kuropean medical council would have abandoned the
bruised and discoloured corpse as fit only to be " food
for worms." But no member of the community could
be spared in such a period of enthusiasm and expan-
sion. The newly discovered agents and methods were
brought to bear. Delicate instruments made the heart
first mimic and then produce the true cardiac action.
Currents of magnetism swept the veins, and cleared the
routes for the circulation of the blood, at the same time
stimulating the life-fluid. The livid hue gradually dis-
appeared from the face. Another instrument gave ac-

35° Limanora

tion to the lungs, first in mimic and then in vital way.
Concentrated sustenance was injected into the veins and
soon the breathing grew regular. Yet it needed hours
of this recreative work to bring the spirit to conscious-
ness of itself. Out of the depths the soul seemed to
be dragged by slow steps back into the reluctant body
again. The psych ometer was far more slow to give
signs than the biometer. But, as soon as it revealed
the approach of the soul, the friends of Tamarna were
brought near her, all who had magnetic affinities with
her, and especially her betrothed Omirlo. From that
point the recovery was astonishingly rapid. The mag-
netism of friendship seemed to draw back the spirit
from its desire to escape. The eyes opened, and a
look of intelligence and love shone through their vit-
reous dulness like dawn in a misty sky; recognition
quickly irradiated her whole being, then faded out,
then came again, till at last the curtain which hid the
soul rose, and the very body seemed to become dia-
phanous to the light of reason. The spirit dwelt again
in its old habitation.

The rest was a matter of the commonest medical sci-
ence. Every tissue was restored to its previous healthy
state. Every fracture and bruise and scar was obliter-
ated. Every item of her system which had suffered
beyond the possibility of repair was remade and
grafted into her body again. Nursing and medicated
atmospheres under the wisest medical guidance restored
Tamarna to her duties and to Omirlo as efficient and
graceful and healthy as before the accident.

In spite of this triumphant success of their medical
science, I could see that depression prevailed in the
community. Not even what appeared to me to be the
almost supernatural power of drawing the life back

An Accident 35 l

seemed to console them. For they had often seen still
more wonderful displays of medical skill. Men who
had been for months to all appearance dead were re-
stored to full vital power, even when the microscopic
transformers of dead matter had begun to batten on
their tissues. No body that still retained the human
form was beyond their skill; the soul could be enticed
back after it had accomplished its flight from earth, for
it still kept its affinities to its terrene companions,
though cosmic distances should separate them. That
was the most difficult task, not the recrudescence of
life, but the re-enticement of the spirit that had grown
happy in its release.

When I observed that the meteorological families
were the nearest of all to dejection, even though they
had recovered their loved member, I came to the right
conclusion. It was the accident that had unmanned
them. That they should be taken unawares in a sphere
they had mastered preyed on their minds. For one of
the immediate objects of their science was to take com-
mand of their future, to eliminate the unexpected from
life. What was the value of their progress, if they did
not see more clearly and farther into the sphere of dark-
ness that bounded life like a horizon ? True, the cos-
mic was still infinite in its night for them, and in the
cosmic lay ambushed countless alarms. But they had
driven their outposts far into the twilight. The age
they were in had seen such an expansion of science
that the veil seemed lifted from the face of boundless
night. Their sarmolan pioneered before them into
space, and foretold them the dire catastrophes that
might lie in wait for them. And yet they were at the
mercy of accident. What was the use of such an in-
flux of suggestion from the unknown? What was their

35 2 Limanora

power over nature, if thus they allowed the fortuitous
to drift in upon them ? They had not suffered such
discomfiture for ages. They abhorred the thought
that they should again be the slaves of mere hazard.

But they rebelled against even the appearance of im-
potence, and would not allow any mood approaching
despair to settle on their spirits. At once the Piramo
set about the repair of their defences against accident.
The pirakno was found to be fused into one mass of
metal by the force of magnetism which had gathered
into it from the space around. Another, larger and
more effective, was produced and in it there was a new
arrangement by which the storage was automatically
governed; any increase in the magnetism it received
was at once provided for; and if at any time the inflow
should surpass the capacity for storage, there was a
governor which automatically switched the surplusage
into the sea, or back again into the air.

A sarmolan too was invented which had greater
strength, and at the same time greater nicety of ad-
justment. It could be left in the space beyond the
atmosphere, untended for nights together; for it was
self-recording, and as long as its parts were kept clear
of extraneous matter or force, it was incapable of de-
rangement. Not that it was to be left to itself for a
moment; even though it now regularly telegraphed all
its changes to Rimla and to the locality of the pirakno,
meteorological observers were near it night and day to
watch and interpret its signals. To guard against any
possible assault of accident, other sarmolans were bal-
looned into space whose indications were mutually cor-
rective; where one went astray, the others would be
right.

When Tamarna was completely restored to health

An Accident

353

and it was made certain by the medical tests that every
organ and tissue of her system was fit for its task, her
marriage with Omirlo was accorded; and the two en-
tered on their career of parentage. Their duties were
made lighter, in order that their energy might pass
unimpaired into posterity. They still had their round
of work, that their tissues might not grow flaccid, or
their life tend to excessive solitude. But Omirlo did
for both all that needed great exertion of mental or
physical faculty.

CHAPTER III

DEATH

THE accident drew the two together, strengthening
their affinities into irrevocable bonds. And now
that all was well with them, their sense of the joy. of
life welled through their whole nature. Those who
came near them felt its contagion. Yet there was one
in their family who felt it only to smile at it. The
aged Amiralno had seen so many centuries fleet past
him that the passage of time with its triumphs had
grown stale. He was battling with this nausea of life
when the new age of discovery and invention had come
upon them. And it so far renewed his energy that he
was willing to live through it and take his share in the
additional duties which it laid upon his generation.
He had seen the infancy of the science over which he
now presided pass into lusty youth and thence into
manhood ; and was he to cut his terrene roots before he
had seen its greatest triumphs? Meteorology seemed
about to take as wide regions of space within its scope
as astronomy had; it seemed about to master secrets
that would drive mere chance out of its calculations.
The curiosity and wonder of youth were again stirred
within him. He longed to advance with the new age
into spheres that had so long lain under the horizon,

354

Death 355

only half-guessed at. Before he closed his eyes on
Limanora what wonders might not yet be revealed to
them ? His blood had tingled with the thought, and
his organs were filled with the old energy. He would
resume the direction of his science for many a year to
come.

But the intrusion of accident into his own sphere had
palsied his renewed enthusiasms. For a time, whilst
he was restoring Tamarna to her old self, and barring
out the chance of accident again, he was not conscious
of the check given to the vigour of his functions. But,
when all was well and the families of the Piramo were
busy again at the expansion of meteorology, he knew
that the old nausea had returned with redoubled force.
The impetus of the new age was beginning to fail; its
pace had perceptibly slackened; its best triumphs had
been won; and it needed the ignorance of eyes newly
opened upon the green earth and the azure vault of sky
to peer into the darkness with thrilling hope; it needed
the elasticity of youthful muscles and tissues to with-
stand the weariness and despair that come with the
truer perspective of a gigantic future become a pigmy
past. What had he to do with human prospects, when
a thousand times he had seen them loom large on the
horizon, and then fade into commonplace when real-
ised ? Here had he outlasted a dozen generations of
ordinary men, and shared the triumphs of a people
whose progress compared with that of the rest of the
earth was as lightning to the pace of a snail; and yet,
when he looked at all that they had done in these
thousand years, it was as nothing in the shadow of
what had yet to be done, a poor hand's breadth beside
the voyage of light from a distant star. Where lay
the advantage in extending a life that had seen such

356 Limanora

humiliation before the everlasting future ? He might
spin the thread of his life out for another thousand
years without great effort. But what would that do for
his race, or himself who had seen his past, with all the
achievements that had each seemed as it came within
the range of possibility a marvel surpassing the human,
fade into a microscopic speck underneath the sumless
stars ? The voices of his friends, as they poured con-
solation and eulogy, persuasion and prayer, into his
ears, sounded now like the undistinguishable hum of
insects as sleep comes upon a man in the open. What
would they not have meant to him in the ambitious
time of youth ? How strongly they rang out to him at
the beginning of the last stage of enthusiasm, when
they drove out of him the love of going for ever to
sleep! But, now, that the longing had come to him
again, they sounded idly as the exultant wail of gnats
on the evening air. The life of earth was withdrawn
and distant for him.

And who could raise a word against his release ? He
had done more than his share for the progress of the
race. He had watched the interests of his science and
made it an essential of all advance. He had braced his
energies again and again to meet the requirements of a
new age, another march ahead into the night. He had
time after time molten the Piramo into a new unity by
the magnetism of his enthusiasm. More than once he
had extended the years of his life that he might serve
his race. And now he had skilled men and women
under him, who could do all that he had done, and
more. The exceptional needs of the new time had
found their attendants mechanic or human. The strain
it had put on the efforts of the race was unbent. Why
should he linger in a world grown so stale to him, a

Death 357

world that needed no longer his guidance or even his
help ?

There was one question to answer before the mind of
the community was made up. It was the final scientific
question. Was his vitality great enough yet to bear
the strain, were the impulses of another new age to give
it enthusiasm? Was the soul already too detached from
the body to allow of the two being closel)T reunited for
another great effort? The question was one for their
medical science and psychology to answer. The sid-
ralan or biometer abridged the task of the medical
elders. It reported a low pitch of vital energy, too
feeble to bear up through the labours and watches of
another period. But they were afraid to trust wholly
to so newly invented an instrument and fell back upon
their old elaborate methods of testing; they investigated
the state of every organ and tissue of the aged body with
lavolans, the heart and brain with especial care. And
it was clear from their state that the spirit could not
long reside in them and function them with ease. It
was at this point that the Ooaromo came in to aid them
with their instruments for testing the bond between
soul and body, and for measuring the psychic power
that still remained ready to use the brain and its in-
struments the senses. Their older methods and their
newest apparatus, the ooaran, all agreed in confirm-
ing the conclusion that the medical elders had come to.

For Amiralno himself there remained one serious
question, which had troubled the race from the time
that mere faith had ceased to rule and pilot their creed,
and reason had been accepted as the only ultimate
guide of life, the final court of appeal in which all ques-
tions must be decided. They could not trust to emo-

358 Limanora

tion or instinct; for these were but hard- won creeds and
habits of past imperfect ages grown unconscious of their
origin by transmission from generation to generation.
Authority out of the past, tradition, law of nature, had
the same taint upon them. They were but the crude
conclusions of comparatively primitive times, with the
logic leading to them veiled by oblivion, then thrust
upon later ages as inspiration. All these dogmatic
judges of the present and the future were but the shad-
ows of their own worst and atavistic selves. It was
only an illusion, a mirage in the desert of the past, to
trust these merely subjective impressions as reflections
from the ultimately real, the absolute. A people like
this was sure to abandon all such projections of their
own dead selves as steps to higher than themselves.

Every man had to settle for himself the problems that
his science had been unable to solve, and that he must
find some solution of in death. They had longed and
striven for absolute certainty, yet every new age had to
fall back upon the individual consciousness and hope,
which were wholly on the side of belief in personal im-
mortality. They knew that the energy in them could
never die, whatever form it might take. Never had
they found in the whole round of their investigations
anything like absolute death or annihilation; every
change that they observed, however far into infinity
they had searched, was but a transformation of energy,
and not its final evanishment. Matter was only a rest-
ing-place, a half-way house, of energy. And even
matter was a comparative term, depending on the
sensuous point of view of the observer. What was
matter to one generation was found by a later to be
pure energy, or even a mass of life. What was matter
to one sense was to another nothing but energy. And

Death 359

the development of new senses, that gave them full
consciousness of some hitherto- unrecognised type of
energy, saved them from the dogmatism about the
future based upon the idea that all types of energy were
known to them. Their wonderful instruments of re-
search revealed to them worlds of energy which might
have lain for ages undiscovered, and swept out all
stupid trust in the omniscience of the senses or the in-
stincts. They refused to dogmatise about the existence
or non-existence of any type of energy or being. Nay,
they preferred to accept provisionallythe existence of
any form that their imagination might sketch out as
possible and as consistent with the laws they had found
permeating all the known universe. Belief was for
them hope waiting for realisation.

Every new discovery pointed more and more defin-
itely to the greater persistence of the higher forms of
energy. What appeals to the more primitive and lower
set of senses holds to even its inner form for but a com-
paratively brief time. Touch is the primary sense,
and all that it, unaided by the other senses, can dis-
cover is apt to keep changing its form. Taste and
smell are simple modifications of touch and they report
of things in perpetual transformation. Hearing and
sight are the highest of the first set of senses; for they
respond to types of energy that travel from vast dis-
tances. Hearing is the lower of the two, because the
lower senses are conscious unaided of the medium in
which the energy travels. Sight has as her courier an
energy which bridges infinity, and its medium no lower
sense can cognise. lyight approaches nearer to inde-
structibility than anything the original senses know.
The last- developed of the senses, the firla, takes cog-
nisance of an energy, magnetism, which is farthest of

360 Limanora

all from the need of a material medium; whilst the fil-
ammu or will-telegraph brings soul to soul irrespective
of all sense-cognisable means of communication, and
proves the existence of a medium more refined than
any that either the senses or the reason has yet come
to know. This medium, doubtless that of thought
itself, as the highest and least material, must be least
destructible, least transformable, least unstable in
equilibrium of all known mediums. Their ooarans
would soon be made delicate enough to measure the
faintest presence of soul, and would decide the point
whether this medium, evidently spread throughout the
universe, was of the same stuff as the soul.

Still were they far from scientific proof of the eternal
unity and individuality of the soul. They had rea-
soned out iii accordance with all the axioms of their
science the indestructibility of energy, and the rising
untransformability of the higher types of energy; they
had also reasoned out as certainly that mediums of en-
ergy had stability of equilibrium proportionate to the
refinement of the energy travelling through them, and
that thus the soul was nearer to everlasting persistence
as a unity than any medium they scientifically knew.
But that on its escape from the body it continued for
ever as an individuality they could only assume; they
could not prove it. They shrank from the idea that it
was for ever past transformation; for that meant the
eternal continuance of the last stage of life. It was
indeed contrary to all the results of their scientific
investigations to think that any type of energy or
medium could at any time cease to change, that is, to
improve or degenerate. Perpetual transformation was,
as far as they had been able to search, the universal
law: it might be into a higher or more stable form,

Death 361

or into a lower or more material form, but onwards
must every energy move. The higher it went, the less
did it tend to fall back. The law of eternal advance
was surer in its action in the higher ranges of existence.
And the whole effort of I^imanoran life was to purify
and ennoble the energy that was in it. For, reasoning
on the analogy of all the nature they knew, they had
little doubt that the platform they reached by the end
of their terrene life was the platform from which their
enfranchised energy or individuality, whichever it was,
started on its new career.

Whether it was mere unconscious energy or energy
conscious of its own unity that escaped from the body,
when it was left to the disintegrant power of micro-
scopic organisms, was still a question. The recent
discoveries and investigations of the Ailomo or astrobio-
logical families had revealed all space filled not merely
with types of energy that were directed and did not
guide themselves, but with embodiments of energy
which were clearly individualities; not alone the poor
microscopic attenuations of life that were waiting for
a world to settle on, but highly organised beings, lead-
ing a vigorous, self-dependent life in the vast regions
of infinitude. This much they knew from the filmy
impressions which their air-transcending lavolans
brought down from the heights of heaven they scaled.
But whence those inhabitants of the ether came they
had not yet been able to tell; for their presence
affected no existing human sense, but only left on the
irelium films certain visible impressions. Whether
they were refugees from other stars, or everlasting oc-
cupants of interstellar space, and whether amongst
them there were any of the emancipate from human
trammels were questions they had not yet been able to

362 Limanora

answer. But they hoped soon to have an instrument
which would indicate the presence of personality as
apart from vital energy, and as apart from the thought
and thought-faculty. Then would they be able to tell
in what state the enfranchised energy fled from the
body at death.

Amiralno knew not, cared not, whether he would re-
tain consciousness of his past, or would become but a
part of the wandering energy of space; what he did
know was that he would be released from the burden
of his body and the growing weariness that dragged it
down. Certain he was that his flesh-emancipated en-
ergy would find a career at least as noble as his past.
And he believed that its development would not end
there, whatever became of it; whether it was to con-
tinue the unity it had been conscious of for so many
years, or to take another form and individuality, was
to him a matter of little concern. One thing he knew,
and that was the growing imperfection of the body as
an instrument of the energy that functioned it. It
weighted to the ground the soul, the spirit, the mind,
or whatever name he might give to the fiery stuff which
kept it still aflame, and yet chafed to be free. As
long as it held this energy in leash, it would live and
glow with thought. Nor was this fiery stuff mere
vitality, the mere principle of life, though the two
were yoked together. It was different in quality from
that which merely vegetated in the plant, and that
which did nothing but feed and evacuate in the mol-
lusc. Nay, it differed in inner character, not merely
from the mind of the savage, but from that of their own
highly civilised exiles. Limanoran advance had puri-
fied it of grosser desires and passions and made it a
thing of ethereal longings and ideals; even the body

Death 363

had been transformed into something more like what
the soul of their far past had been, subtle, buoyant,
sublimated. Still it dragged the spirit down, whenever
the limits of corporeal life became too apparent. Many
a long generation of fiery self -disciplined work upon
their constitutions would it take even this marvellous
people to etherealise their bodies so far as to make
them fit companions of their souls.

Amiralno had not the vital energy to bear up against
the conditions that harassed their still hybrid system.
He had no desire to stay and see the slow evolution of
a body that would pace with the soul through infinity.
Better to have release and a new and untrammelled
career even if the form he should take was unknown to
him. It was the nature of all energy to change, and
the higher in the scale it rose, the nimbler it became.
But in order to rise it had to be yoked for a time with
a lower form, which it used as medium and leverage,
leaving it as soon as it had accomplished its due devel-
opment. All things tended to rise above themselves;
and it was the greatest of disasters, the very reversal of
nature, if ever they should fall back, as they often did.
What we call death was but the unyoking of a higher
energy from a lower, which it had temporarily made
its comrade and medium. It was no misfortune or
degradation, but a step higher in enfranchisement.
The animate resisted this step, because one member
in the lifelong partnership refused to descend into
a grosser transformation again. In the human, the
nobler the thought-energy, the higher it strove to raise
itself before the inevitable divorce from its lower
medium and yoke- fellow. But when the time of sever-
ance approached, it mastered the reluctance of the
lower, and yearned to be set free. And little wonder

364 Limanora

that the lower resisted; for back it had to fall in the
cosmic order, and begin again its slow progress upward
from grade to grade; first into the clutches of myriads
of microscopic disintegrators of its tissues that would
transform it into food for plant-life, and then by weary
stages upwards through vegetable and animal tissue,
perchance into the sustenance of thought again.

This people, I soon found, had overcome the ancient
abhorrence of death. For they identified their life and
personality with the higher of their energies, and not
with the lower and bodily forms. They shrank, it is
true, from all that would lead to the divorce of the
yoked energies of any animate being before its due
time; not so much because they thought this an evil
for the victim as because the perpetration would im-
plant in the doer a germ of retrogression. To be cruel,
to shed blood, was the beginning of degradation of the
soul ; it was one of the acts that allowed the lower to
take command of the higher in their system. But for
a Limanoran himself to approach death became, when-
ever he saw it to be inevitable, the keenest joy, in spite
of the farewells it entailed. He knew that thereafter,
should he make effort to live, he would only clog the
wheels of progress, he would only be a burden on the
race instead of its helper. Amiralno never showed the
slightest sign of shrinking from the dissolution of his
life-bonds. He was sad to leave his lifelong mate, with
whom he had done so much for the race; but he knew
that she would soon follow him; it was a matter of
but a few days or months; her thought-energy would
mingle and commune with his again, freed from the
material trammels that checked and dulled their inter-
course in their terrene life; upwards through the ether

Death 365

their souls would climb, ever becoming purer and
swifter in their flight.

But, as I went about my duties, my thoughts would
break away to the coming death-scene and sadness
would cloud them. I remembered the last farewells of
my buried life, and most of all the watch over the
fading light in my mother's eyes. Nothing could burn
out of my memory the bitterness of at last facing the
inevitable. Slowly had I been led by the physician to
realise that nothing could save her, and still I hoped
against hope, checking my tears lest she should see
them and conjecture my alarm. Only when the lips
became silent and pale did I at last admit the thought
that this was death. How could I stifle my grief
longer ? Were we not all to each other, this mother,
who had clung to me and nursed me through sorrows
and misfortunes, I her only child, who had refused to
leave her for the seductions of great place and fortune ?
She was vanishing for ever from me, and nothing I
could do would bring her back. I was caught and
crushed by the iron hand of fate and stood in stony
silence, paralysed by my grief and my impotence.
There was too much of the man and the stoic in my
young blood to cry out; but if only I could give up my
own life to bring hers back! In one of her final wak-
ing dreams she prattled and wept over me as if I were
a child again, saved once more from the clutching
breakers. Raising herself with a wild cry from her
pillow, she held me in her arms with fierce love; only
for a moment; then the cords that bound her life
brake; the memory had torn her heart. There she
lay, all that I cared for on earth, rigid, uncaring. If
but I could have died with her there! Alas, the life in
me was too puissant to yield, the nerves too tough to

366 Limanora

break! The passion came on me to hurl myself into
her grave as the clods fell. It was but an insensate im-
pulse. I made no cry or sign till I got into the lonely
chamber; and there God alone knows how I survived
my hurricane of grief and desolation. Nor could years
ever root out the sorrow. There in L,imanora, with an
abyss between me and my past, and a noble new life
around me, I worked and wept. The wound had
opened afresh. Was I never to commune with that
loving loved spirit again ?

There was a touch on my hand, and the magnetism
of sympathy and consolation flowed through my sys-
tem. It was Thyriel. She had felt my deep grief,
though then at a great distance from me, and without
noise or speech she had come to my side. So absorbed
had I been in my past and my sorrow that I knew not
her presence till her magnetic touch awakened me from
my dream. She had realised in a moment whither my
thoughts had gone, and reverenced the holy past.
Then, when the mood was growing despotic and para-
lysing the soul, she stepped into the startled silence. I
was myself again, and swept the unmanly tears away.

Yet I could not drive the sadness of farewell out of
my system. Here was this sage, who had so often
counselled me and guided my faltering footsteps, about
to vanish for ever from the scene of his triumphs.
Oblivion would sweep his memory and his work into
the abyss. We would see him no more; no more hear
his grave wise sayings, weighted with the experience of
centuries. All his gathered knowledge and skill would
lapse; and our civilisation would be the poorer. Up
the steep of progress it would have to climb, weaker for
the absence of this strong arm, this much-exercised and
full brain and heart.

Death 367

These were the thoughts at the root of my sadness,
when I was startled out of them by my companion's
voice. She had waited in reverential silence as long as
I lived my filial past over again ; but, when I returned
to my starting-point, and began spending fruitless re-
grets and pangs over that which neither demanded nor
warranted them, her thoughts broke out into loud
protest. She could no longer endure such futilities,
such waste of tissue, and she met my wailing reflections
one by one. Amiralno was glad to leave his chrysalis
stage of existence; the energy that was in him would
find a freer scope, a nobler sphere, as soon as it had
shed its earthly trammels. His counsel and guidance
would not be lost to progress; all that he was and had
would still be part of what he would become; not one
thought or faculty would be left behind; and all would
then be spent not on the progress of a little island of a
small terrestrial archipelago or its race, but on that of
the universe, if not of the cosmos. All of him that
could still appeal to our lower senses would remain
with us, and would immortalise his memory, as far as
immortality would go upon this ephemeral orb. As for
his sympathy and love, they were doubtless still with
us, or at least with what in us was best and nearest the
cosmic. The only thing to regret was that we could
not personally feel his presence in the universe. But
even this was not for idle regrets. It was mere palsy,
if it did not stir us to still further mastery of our con-
ditions. Were we not in the way to feel and know the
escaped spirits of our dead ? Had we not developed
senses in us that were receivers of impulses from the
infinite around us, impulses that had been dormant
through the uncounted past ? Had we not instru-
ments that told us of energies and beings unfelt even

368 Limanora

by our new-developed senses ? And were we to
grope in our prison-house, and wail over what we
had lost and could not longer see ? Were we to sit
in the darkness, and weep and wait, hoping for the
light? Such feeble conclusions from the past, such
futile regrets over the dead, Limanoran progress could
not endure. There were new masteries for every gen-
eration. Before many years could pass they would get
into touch with the spirits and energies that had fled;
it might be by means of new instruments; it might be
by new senses; nothing but our own dulness broke the
connection between our energies and theirs; what we
had still to win was consciousness, if not mastery, of
that finer type of matter which they now used as
medium for their energy. It was only the lifting of
another of the myriad veils that hung before our senses
dulling their perceptions. This was no more than
what they had done a thousand times already. A death
was a stimulus to joy and new effort. It taught us the
limits of our knowledge and our power; and limits
known were limits soon to be overpassed.

Her bright activity and banter surprised me into
laughter at my own folly and obtuseness. Scarcely
had I reached this consummation before I knew that
there was gladness in the air of the island. How could
I have failed to notice the jubilant strains that were
fitfully wafted across my hearing, unless through my
dull absorption in my own feelings ? I felt thankful
to Thyriel that I had been drawn out of my isolation,
which seemed to me now little less than disloyalty to
the race that had done so much for me.

I wondered what could be the occasion of all this
exultation that I was conscious of. Paean after paean

Death 369

rose from every part of the island, and, as the moments
passed, the many-sounding music seemed to gather to-
wards one centre. The radius lessened, and adjacent
masses of melody fused together. Nearer and nearer
they came, ever more coalescing and lessening in num-
ber; then the jubilance melted into grave and massive
harmony, and I recognised some of the world-music I
had heard from the cosmophone. The sense of uni-
verses creating and dissolving sprang into my mind. It
was the diapason of creation that was ringing through
the island. Loud, then low, the cosmic symphony
swept the amosphere like a tempest. I knew that some
far-reaching event or movement was occurring amongst
this people.

I turned to my comrade to confirm and define my
conjectures, but she was gone. Away on the horizon
I could see the rapid beat of her wings. I followed as
swiftly as I could, and, as I rose in the air, I saw com-
pany after company soaring like coveys of birds towards
a high isolated plateau that stretched from far up Lila-
roma and beetled cliff-like over the sea. I had often
used it as a flight-platform whence I could spring into
the air, and had long known it by the name of Dooma-
lona. I had never thought over the meaning of the
word, but now it flashed upon me that it meant the hill
of farewells. Thence messengers who were embarking
on difficult and important expeditions set out. The
elders of the people and the families of the couriers
came here to give them their love and benison, in order
to make them feel, as they journeyed, that the sym-
pathy of their home went with them like a fire from the
hearth.

I had observed that in these farewells this simple-
hearted people made little outward sign of the depth of

37° Limanora

their emotions. Only the magnetic look out of the
eyes would have told a stranger what benignity lay
underneath. Nor was it merely to show how sympa-
thetic they were that they thus accompanied their for-
eign couriers to the outskirts of the island. It was
chiefly to give them each his contribution of magnet-
ism, to lessen their burden on their far journey, to
make them feel how much the spirit of the community
went with them. Not one of them would ever allow
himself to indulge in so idle an evidence of emotion as
tears. There was in this people a vein of stoicism, I
thought; they seemed to repress all mere symbols of
feeling. A European would have called their farewells
dull and emotionless, if not stony-hearted. There was
no kissing or embracing; there was not even the shak-
ing of hands or bowing of heads. Without physical
contact their spirits could work upon each other with
a power that in other civilisations would have been
called witchcraft. Through their firlas, through their
eyes, rayed forth a keen soul-stirring magnetism. And
each assisted the other in preventing the approach of
the old wasteful manifestations of sorrow or despon-
dency. Lamentation was a thing of the far, almost
prehistoric, past; a sob or sigh or even complaint they
knew too well from their physiological knowledge to
be mere emotional extravagance, a waste of the energy
or the tissue, all of which was needed for the strenuous
endeavour towards a higher plane. So it was that they
seemed to me stoical in positions where the men and
women I had known in my youth would burst into
weeping and wailing, or cries and gestures of affection.
But in these scenes of farewell there was needed little
energy of repression; the real struggle had occurred
many generations before in their history. They had

Death 37 1

once had a most elaborate symbolism not merely of feel-
ings but of almost every human thought and spiritual
attitude. But when the great national repentance was
leading to the series of exilings that ultimately purified
the race, they became uneasy about this vast system
of symbolism; it covered their whole existence from
birth to death, from toothache to the salvation of the
soul, and seemed to be nature her very self. They had
long known it to be the nesting-place of all hypocrisies
and untruth. Under its shelter mean things and falsity
and even grossness and cruelty could flourish fearless
of harm. Everything could masquerade in the guise
of anything else it pleased. Of course there were pain-
ful revelations and scandals at times; but they were
soon hushed up. The system was too much the in-
terest of all who had power or reputation or prosperity,
the best of what was then life, to let it get into disre-
pute, or into risk of revolution or reform. There were
various professions which were deeply involved in the
retention of it, and they were recruited chiefly from
the highest social classes. The lawyers battened on the
ambiguity of the symbols, whether expressed in word
or deed ; the doctors would have lost half their hysteri-
cal and hypochondriac patients if it had been abol-
ished; without it the life and pretensions of the military
during time of peace would have been a farce and a
mockery ; and the occupation of the priests would have
vanished altogether. Ceremony seemed the very life-
blood of an aristocratic state, and especially of its army
and its church. It kept the mere workers and plodders
at a respectful distance, it fenced off criticism, and
supplied topics for the tongue of fame. To abolish
ceremony would have been to strike at the heart of all
existing institutions.

372 Limanora

But, as the purgation proceeded, every occasion for
it naturally disappeared. Ceremonial ceased when the
church lapsed and the priestly profession went into
exile. Ceremony vanished with the expulsion of the
militant elements and the professional politicians. The
bureau of fame collapsed with its accursed spawn, un-
charitableness and evil feeling, servility, adulation,
and pretence. The pharisaism of the whole system
stood out in all its offensiveness, and the foulness and
injustice that were concealed by this constant mas-
querade in the robes of greatness. It was meant to
overawe the unthinking, to make ignorance grovel at
the feet of those in power. It had been useful in far
past times of savagery in cowing the beast in the hu-
man mind and keeping it caged. But a form that has
life and meaning and power in the ruder stages of de-
velopment becomes a curse, if continued into periods
of advanced civilisation. They now felt that their elab-
orate symbolism had been an insult to their intelli-
gence; for they had no brutality in them to be muzzled.
To keep up the pretence of greatness or virtue or love
or respect or truth, where there was none, was useful
as long as most of the community were ignorant, or su-
perstitious, or fierce and intolerant in disposition. But
when the race had grown gentle and humane and more
and more progressive, it was not merely a farce to re-
tain so much deception and mummery in life, it was a
gross outrage on all that was just and noble and
spiritual. Why should not the reverence or affection
of the human spirit be allowed to shine forth from the
countenance without such ridiculous trammels, such
coarse humiliations ? Forms compelling a show of rev-
erence or love where there is none, are but the trap-
pings of slaves, and soon ingrain the thoughts and

Death 373

feelings of slaves on the one side, whilst bringing out
and confirming the nature of bullies and tyrants on the
other. Every relic of a past that had harboured and
perpetuated such a system was painfully ejected from
their natures. They would have nothing in them that
savoured of such a death-in-life. All mere forms, all
ceremonials and ceremonies had to go. Ostentation
and parade became abhorrent to them. Pageant and
spectacle, pomp and solemnity vanished from their
lives. All formality of manner or intercourse, even
etiquette and salutation, was driven out with con-
tumely.

One of the most singular effects of this expulsion
of mere symbolism was the disappearance of ridicule
and jest. This disappearance was quite unexpected,
and yet, when they came to reflect on the phenomenon,
they saw how natural it was. The obverse of the pas-
sion for applause and influence is necessarily the desire
to depreciate possible rivals, to make them seem small,
and even to trample them in the dust. And the most
successful and least apparently ill-natured method of
fulfilling this is to get them laughed at and so con-
temned. With the ignoble itch for fame went the love
of ridicule. The jesters, habitual as well as profes-
sional, disappeared with the priests, the soldiers, the
lawyers, and the politicians. Not that the Limanorans
abandoned the use of humour; they still saw too clearly
the incongruities of existence, cosmic as well as human,
to cease bringing them out in startling flashes of vivid
expression. They never indulged in that boisterous
laughter which is so often thought in the West the
simplest and most primitive guaranty of enjoyment;
for that is as much a waste of valuable tissue as uncon-
trollable grief. Their laughter was of that low, gentle,

374 Limanora

tolerant, almost inward, kind, which brightens the na-
ture to its very heart; its only outer mark was perhaps
a smile. Never indeed was I amongst a people that
looked at existence so cheerfully or enjoyed its little
ironies with so light-hearted a geniality. Buoyancy,
joyousness, was the most constant characteristic of
their spirits. Their intercourse with each other was
ever sunny and pleasant-witted, though never jocular.
There was no malice or false sense of superiority in
their humour or laughter.

But jest tbey came to abhor as an indignity to the
human spirit which was striving to obliterate all traces
of its ape-ancestry. The jester implied or produced
contempt for his topic, for his victim, and generally for
himself. He usually adopted mimicry as the easiest
method of bringing about his effect. And so he nursed
the ape in him, and pointed back to the vile type from
which he had sprung. It was the other kinship of
man, his divine relationship, that the Limanorans pre-
ferred to acknowledge and nurture. Never did they
forget it in their conduct. It moulded their ideals, it
directed their purposes, it created their instincts. And
to use ridicule was to outrage it, to call up the beast in
them, the element, the ancestry that they did their
best to forget. Whenever the sense of mutual sym-
pathy crept through the community, the degradation of
jest and ridicule, not for the victim alone, but for the
jester, became self-evident. They were felt to be in-
humane, if not inhuman, and died an easy death with
all the vast system of symbolism.

It was a surprise to me then to see so large an as-
semblage winging their way to Doomalona. It seemed
as if there was about to be a great ceremonial. And I

Death 375

was not long in doubt as to the occasion. For with
music that rose and fell in marvellous rhythm like the
waves of the sea there came across the sky a splendid
flight-car, more brilliant in opalescent glow, more ma-
jestic in architecture, than anything I had ever seen.
Its wings flashed fire through the air and seemed to
weave the lightnings of heaven into a diaphanous web.
It was a car of victory; for around it bands of flying
youth raised jubilant harmony, and over its rear rose a
canopy crowned with fire. As it floated nearer I could
see beneath this a figure resting upon an elevated
oouch. The music grew more loudly triumphant as it
hovered downwards to the central plateau of the hill
of farewells. And then I knew that this was Amir-
alno on the couch; and all the people, except the few
who were needed for the essential services of the
island, had assembled to bid him farewell, as he sped
in front of them into the land of shadows whither no
eye could penetrate.

I had without knowing it landed close to Thyriel,
so absorbed had I been in the wondrous spectacle.
She had been busy with the chorus of acclaim, her
thoughts bent on this rare scene of farewell; and she
had not noticed my approach. Then a sudden silence,
as Amiralno stepped from the faleena, startled the
great concourse out of their entranced attitude; their
thoughts were set free as by the touch of a magic
wand. It was at this that Thyriel became conscious of
my presence. I knew in a moment that she had recog-
nised the criticism in my mind. Yet she did not an-
swer or explain the anomaly. She remained perfectly
still.

A burst of jubilant music broke my reverie, as the
sudden silence had broken it before. It led me back

376 Limanora

to the symphony of the spheres to which I had been ac-
customed to listen with rapt attention. I could recog-
nise the harmonious strain that meant the creation of a
world. I could almost see the whirling orb of fire, as
it flew off from the parent sun, and swept into its glow-
ing round through heaven. Nothing I had ever heard
could match the rapturous melody which expressed the
approach of life to the surface of the new star. Quicker
and quicker grew the* pace, and higher the pitch, as the
living creation developed and spread over the world.
Then came a wild dithyramb, as man broke from his
bestial surroundings, and mastered his fellow-beasts by
cunning, and drew fire from heaven for his purposes.
A nobler strain followed, rhythmically measuring the
steps by which he rose out of himself and climbed the
steep of heaven. Silver-toned harmonies told of his
masterpieces of art. L,oud diapasons spoke out his
marching armies and fierce battles. Soft involved
fugues and dulcet chants expressed the struggles and
conquests of thought.

I stood absorbed in the interpretation of this ravish-
ing music, and failed to observe the progress of events
upon the lofty plateau. Amiralno had taken up an
erect position on what might have been called an altar,
had the scene been a religious one. His face was to-
wards heaven. He held his right hand as if waving
back those whom he forbade to follow him; for close to
him stood the partner of his earthly life, her face set as
if she would depart. Around stood his lifelong com-
rades and counsellors, yet at a lower level, so that every
act of the departing could be seen by the concourse.
Near him were erected two columns, on the higher of
which and above his head I could distinguish a psy-
chometer, on the lower a biometer. Behind him had

Death 377

been built into the rock an elaborate piece of machin-
ery, which I recognised as a manana or petrifier. Often
had I seen it transfix almost in a moment a beautiful
plant, substituting irelium for its living tissues, and
making every leaf and flower of its translucent crystal.
By means of electric currents, it sent streams of the
atomic constituents of irelium along the sap-channels
from rootlet to leaf- tip; it used the living powers of the
plant to turn it as it died into undecaying metal. For
hundreds of years the flower would live and be a thing
of beauty, even if no care was further spent on it; and,
if cared for, it would resist the finger of decay for thou-
sands and thousands of years.

At last I was to see the transfiguration of a Lima-
noran. I had often almost doubted the origin of those
lifelike statues that stood in Fialume, and death was so
rare a thing among this long-lived people that during
my many years amongst them I had never had the
opportunity of satisfying the doubt. Curiosity over-
shadowed my other feelings and made me forget the
grief which would keep creeping into my heart at this
farewell scene in spite of the j ubilant music. I strained
every nerve and sense to catch the features of the
strange event. Thyriel, I felt, was as eager as I to see
all that would occur, and I could see that the younger
half of the concourse had their attention closely riveted
upon the scene. •

The observer of the biometer raised his eyes to the
indicator, which had now begun to move in rapid oscil-
lations. Amiralno lifted the forefinger of his left hand
as if giving a signal. He looked back a moment with
longing in his eyes at his life-partner. From the
manana there sprang out an upright groove towards
the dying man, and in this he was caught, as his

Limanora

vitalityrose to its greatest effort before the final collapse.
The indicator of the sidralan shot upwards with great
violence, and then' fell still. Almost at the same mo-
ment the guardian who stood on the loftier column be-
side the psychometer raised himself in agitation. The
indicator had begun the same violent oscillations as
that of the biometer. There could be little doubt that
the individual energy or soul of the vanished Amiralno
had passed near it in his flight upwards.

Through the brief and impressive scene the note of
creation rang in the music that filled the air, and never
that of dissolution. Then burst forth the chorus of
freedom, which was the national song, if anything
might be so called. It was the liberation of the energy
of their friend and comrade that they united to cele-
brate, his entrance on a new career untrammelled by
lower forms of inert energy. The music rose as if on
wings, higher, higher, ever more exhilarant. There
were in it none of the undertones, or deeper notes, or
mystic subtleties that marked so many of their spheral
harmonies. It was a sound of pure joy, ethereal, su-
pernal, unalloyed by any terrene longings. Who could
think of grief or the bitterness of farewells, as long as
it rang through the sky ? Courage, confidence to climb
upwards was the only emotion that could live with joy
in its presence.

Suddenly the music broke away into a tempest of
cosmic melody. Now wailed forth the wild song of
dissolution of worlds, again the clashing of conflicting
systems, followed by the surge of new life in orbs that
were to whirl through space and elevate the existence
upon them for thousands of thousands of ages. It was
the music of mingled creation and disintegration, of
development and decay which we heard once more.

Death 379

Our thoughts were recalled from the heights of
heaven, whither the lost personality of our guide and
friend had fled. We were absorbed again in the strug-
gle of a mixed existence; we felt again the agonies of
the higher active energies bound to lower and merely
latent energies. My eyes came down to the scene of
the last farewell. There stood the almost living statue
of our vanished brother, erect, eager as for flight, as
at the moment when his energy had gone forth. But
now it had the clear metallic translucence of the thou-
sands I had seen in Fialume. The transfiguration was
complete.

But there was more on the plateau than the figure of
what had been. Beside it with rapt, pleading gaze on
her face stood yet unmoved the life-comrade of the
vanished. The manana was again in position, the
observers again stood by the biometer and the psy-
chometer. Another scene of departure and trans-
figuration was to be enacted. The whole consciousness
of the community had granted without words the peti-
tion of Amiralno's spouse. Nothing seemed to be so
fitting as that the two should leave their trammelled
life together, and within the space of a few hundred
beatings of the pulse partner had followed partner.
The two lives, joined for so many centuries, had come
to a close together. Out into infinite space had fled the
two intertwined energies, only a few heartbeats apart.
Perhaps together they would find their new sphere,
their new platform for still higher flight through the
diviner stages of existence.

The Limanorans, when they had reached what they
considered the limits of their usefulness in corporeal
life, gained an instinctive knowledge of the moment
when death was certain to come, or perhaps it was an

380 Limanora

instinctive power of dying. It is a common thing to
see amongst savage or half -civilised tribes a man or
woman in full health deliberately lie down, turn the
face away from friends and light, and prepare to die.
They seem to know when their destiny is coming upon
them, and nothing will persuade them to take measures
for driving it off. Strong though the currents of life
may be flowing in the veins at the moment, it is not
long before they have completely ebbed, and left the
body a pulseless mass of inert matter. It was this
instinct, whether prophetic or suicidal, that the aged
amongst this people seemed to resume when they had
weighed the vital powers in their systems against the
duties that new ages with their progress would bring,
and found them wanting. Destiny seemed to speak
out to them, when they saw the transference of the
minus to the wrong side. Their minds were made up
and it needed but a few days or hours to set the im-
prisoned energy free. In these later and more scien-
tific ages there was some delay, and not uncommonly a
postponement of the departure. A careful examination
of the system by means of their new scientific instru-
ments revealed some radical mistake in the judgment
of the elder as to himself, or the demands of a new age
of discovery made the need of more brains and hands
imperative. The result was the same in both cases;
the reason was persuaded to give up its resolve; life
flowed on in the veins with even power again; all the
old duties were resumed; and the day of farewells was
put off till a more convenient season. But once they
were convinced that they were retarding progress in-
stead of accelerating it, the end, they felt, was within
measurable distance; they straightway relinquished
their grasp of life; they withdrew purpose and power

Death 381

of will from all their vital functions; and the moment
of the final collapse was practically within their own
choice, as soon as they had the consciousness of the
whole community with them.

Here stood two solid memorials to the working of
this prescient or devitalising power. The beauty of
expression on the two faces was very striking. The
attitudes were as natural and noble as life itself, that
of Amiralno bidding his partner farewell, hers full of
loving petition to follow. That the whole people ap-
proved was clear in the heartiness with which they
broke into the song of liberation. Everyone was glad
that the energies of these two, who had done their full
duty by the race, were free to enter other spheres, and
follow other than the terrene methods of advance.
Reverently, but still with great rejoicing, the family of
the departed placed the two lifelike statues in the car
of victory, and guided it in triumphal flight to the val-
ley of memories. Then the people as reverently and
joyously bent their way to the duties they had left.

I stood in a day-dream of the strange but noble ways
of life that this people followed, and suddenly awakened
to find myself alone on the hill of farewells overlooking
the ocean. Sorrow over the departures I had witnessed
welled back into my heart; I had not yet got rid of the
old attitude of Western civilisation towards death.
With the sorrow mingled still the old curiosity ; ques-
tions sprang into my mind concerning the significance
of the ceremony I had seen ; or was it a ceremony ? I
was startled with the answer in the negative. It came
from Thyriel, who, knowing my doubts, had remained
to solve them. Soon I knew the whole meaning of the
scene. It was not premeditated. There was nothing

382 Limanora

deliberate about it except the deaths themselves. The
dulness of my own inner senses had prevented me from
knowing the common impulse of the race towards
Doomalona. As soon as Amiralno had finally resolved
to die, the consciousness of his resolve spread over the
island, and stirred the people at their duties to common
action. They knew that the hill of farewells would be
the scene of the departure, and in bands singing the
cosmic music of farewell they made their flight through
the air to give a last valediction to the voyager into the
unknown and to impart to him in his final effort on
earth all the magnetic power they could spare for him
on his journey. Every act of what I had thought was
a ceremonial was the natural and spontaneous impulse
of a people united in spirit. Their music and the
changes in it were due to no leader or signal, but to
the sympathetic inspiration of the moment. Their
creational chant was an assertion of their mood of be-
lief that this scene was one of advance, and not of retro-
gression, of development and not of decay, that the act
was as much an act of cosmic life as the creation of a
world. Certain portions of the system were about to
become manifestly inert, those which were called bodily
and material, but which were as truly forms of energy
as the individual energy that was being liberated.
They were made unchanging, permanent, for a time,
and so were unable to progress or retrograde; they
were to retain their energy in latency for a period long
or short; but at last they too, when their immediate
purpose of remembrance of the vanished was served,
would be set free to take other forms. Their creational
music was intended, if there was any intention in so
spontaneous a thing, to keep before their minds the
progressive and evolutionary nature of death, and to

Death 3&3

quell the old and barbarous attitude of grief which
might attempt to show itself when they were bidding
the final farewell to a comrade. It was meant to bring
into prominence the joy of the spirit freed from the
bondage to lower forms of energy, and the delight of
all who remained in the progress of the cosmos, even
though the immediate act should imply a separation of
a loved spirit from them. It helped them to repress
any sadness at the thought that they might never
recognise the energy of their lost comrade again as an
individual and personal thing. Enough for them that
the sum of existence should be enriched by the change
which was occurring to him.

But was it not a grief to them that the parting was
perhaps eternal, as far as personal recognition went ?
The question rose spontaneously in my mind; and I
was answered almost before I had thought it. The
doubt was still unsolved whether as impersonal energy
they developed into something new at death and for
ever ceased to bear marks and memories of the phase
of existence they had just left, or whether they sallied
forth from the bonds of a lower and inert energy into
the freer scope of infinity, an individual and complete
unity. This doubt, they were certain, would be solved
some da}' by scientific experiment. Meantime there
were compensating advantages, whichever alternative
was true. If they continued the personality they had
already developed on earth without break in conscious-
ness or memory, then would they recognise their old
comrades and partners in Limanoran life, and make
further progress through existence together.

If, on the other hand, there was a break in the con-
tinuity, and only as an impersonal energy they passed
forth into the interstellar spaces, then would there be

384 Limanora

the obliteration of all the animal and barbarous past
which they abhorred, as well as of the immediate and
Limanoran past which they loved. Any being that
has advanced much in its more recent stages must
naturally try to forget the lower stages through which
it has gone in a more distant past. They were by no
means proud of their relationship to their exiles or to
the still older and wider humanity existing outside of
their archipelago. To remember it was to encourage
the lower and less-advancing man in them. To forget
it was one of the ethical duties which their progress
demanded. It was only as a horror, as a possible hell
into which they might fall, if they retrograded, that it
was still brought before them.

A race or nation that remains long proud of its past
must be but imperceptibly progressive, if it is pro-
gressive at all. Its ethical point of view is stationary,
its morals and religion are stagnant. The history of a
people should rapidly come to seem ignoble to it, if it
does its duty to itself and its progress. What is the
history of other races but a record of wars, of wholesale
slaughters, because of the ambition of a man or a sec-
tion of men ? And as long as we are proud of such a
past we can never advance. To have an ancestry
nobler than ourselves is an undying disgrace, and to
suggest such a thing to a man should be considered the
grossest insult. Where a people is developing as it
ought to develop in the brief period it has upon earth,
oblivion should be one of its foremost duties to all but
its immediate past. Man has forgotten his bestial
ancestry so effectually that when he comes across the
manifest relics of the relationship in his system, he
is startled and wildly denies it. If he progressed as
rapidly as he ought to do, after there has been im-

Death

planted in him the divine principle of reason, then
would he as surely cast into oblivion his savage and
semi-civilised ancestry. Out with the ape and all relics
and memories of it is the struggle of thinking men. To
be done with the crude undeveloped past is the duty of
progressive men. The ideal of to-day should be the
commonplace of to-morrow, and the disgrace of next
week. It was useful to study the immediate past in
order to get perspective for the present, and to decide on
the rate of progress for the future. But it was becoming
doubtful to this people whether they should perpetuate
in the valley of memories so much of the past after it
had faded into insignificance. They had come to think
that to forget was as necessarj7 to the advance of man
as to remember, and that a universal rubbish-destructor
for the now poverty-stricken achievements of their far
past would one day become essential. As it was they
still preserved records of them lest some historical
question might grow to be of importance to their future.
It was little wonder then that they had no great
abhorrence for the obliteration of the past from their
energy at death. If the other alternative were the true,
and if, as so many religions teach, they were to be
herded with the criminal and besotted and undeveloped
souls that have passed from the earth, then might they
bid farewell to true progress beyond death. And what
is the meaning of continuity of existence and memory,
unless it be the intercourse of terrene souls in the life
outside of life ? To be rid of the flesh and its inert
energies is still to be enslaved to worse evils, the possi-
bility of contact with the foul beings that inhabit the
human form, even the noblest and most belauded hu-
man form. The Limanorans would gladly abandon
the delight of recognising and loving again the souls

386 Limanora

they knew and loved, if only to be free from such a
horror. Better almost annihilation than enslavement
to the retrogrades of earth in another sphere. Whence
the terror of discontinuity of memory, if the burden of
the past were to be lifted off us, and a new and more
progressive career given to our energy ? The L,inia-
norans believed that when unyoked from the inert
forms which had come from their animal past, their
higher energy would enter on a progress that would
make all they now did seem almost stagnancy; and the
power of remembering any . past would only mean
shame at its having been theirs.

It never gave them pause to think that what came
after death was still .unknown. They had passed a
happy bright life upon the earth, free from the pangs
and agonies as well as the fierce pleasures, the snaky
involvements as well as the passionate amours, of other
civilisations. But, when the effort to live had come to
be so great as to overbalance the compensations and
utilities of their life, then was it no pang for them to
leave it; for they were scientifically sure that death
would be no break in their progressive existence; if
anything, it was certain to be an intensification of the
progress which they loved most.

One of the last of their great series of exilings had
been to cast out of their midst a number of men and
women who never did anything but long for death,
and advocated early suicide with religious fervour as
the true and only panacea for all ills. Their doctrines
would have done little harm to the community, if they
had not been rooted in practice, and often led to tragic
results. For they came from languid, low-strung tem-
peraments, that felt disinclined to face the strain of life

Death 387

or to help the advance of the race. The current of
energy in their ancestry had gradually run more and
more feebly, till it was in them at its lowest ebb. It
was against their grain to work, and they did their
share in the tasks of the community with the most
patent reluctance. This alone would have been reason
enough for their exile, inasmuch as they gave evil ex-
ample to the youth around, But they were subtle in
the use of the tongue too, and could with skilful Jesuitry
show how indolence was the noblest life. And worse
still, when they were left to their own devices, they
soon made a violent end to their feeble lives, and gave
a tragic and ghastly appearance to death. Out into
Thanasia or the isle of death they were one and all de-
ported, with enough goods and provisions to keep them
and their descendants alive, if only they were indus-
trious, for thousands of years. But none of them
would work, or till the soil, or even cook their food;
and one by one they gave themselves up to death.
The more ingenious invented a method of leaving life
which had a certain grace if not nobility. They erected
great funeral pyres and connected them by a slow fuse
to a huge battery that sent up its rod into the heavens.
When a tempest threatened, they laid themselves out
on these, and when the lightning began to flash, the
electricity ran along the wires, lit their fagots, and in a
few moments swept them out of existence. It was not
long before the isle of death was again left to its
silences, nothing but the ashes of its former inhabit-
ants upon the tops of numerous mounds being left to
tell that human life had once been there. No one from
the rest of the archipelago seemed to care for life upon
it; none ever landed there. The only things that
marred the mortuary stillness of the isle were the

388 Limanora

screaming seabirds, and the tempests which drove
them thither.

It was better for the cosmos that these emasculate
weaklings should as soon as possible submit the relics
of energy in them to other conditions of being. But it
was not well for L,imanoran immaturity to have the
spectacle of self-slaughter before them, or the con-
tagion of their death-pyre romance and eloquence
touch the spirit of youth. Moreover they took some
time to resolve on death; and, in the process of form-
ing their resolution, it was the natural habit of these
tame triflers with death to put all the energy they had
into their tongues. As long as they could talk heroics
to anyone about the deed they contemplated, they were
certain not to accomplish it. And romantic chatter is
catching where youth is still unbridled by reason, and
in the young who had robuster wills, the results might
be more prompt.

It was different with the death-scenes of men and
women who had done their duty by the race and by
human progress, and had worked out the best possible
results from the yoking of higher and lower energies.
Theirs was a true liberation from exhausted lower
forms. It was not the languor of the loftier element in
them, but the exhaustion of the lower, that brought
the nausea of their hybrid life. They could feel, as
they looked back, how far their higher or spiritual
energy had risen since their entrance into earthly ex-
istence. Kvery year had seen them climb upwards;
nearer and nearer had their inner energy come towards
touch with that divine medium which was in and yet
above all life and which in youth they were conscious
of only in lofty moments of inspiration. Such were
the supreme ascensions of life, when they were capable

Death

ot the noblest actions and the noblest moral resolves.
These moments became more and more frequent as they
grew older and more progressive, till towards the close
of life they were almost habitual. Limanoran youth
snatched at these supernal moments by the help of
imagination. Limanoran age dwelt habitually in these
moral altitudes that lay far above mere passion or in-
stinct. It was the old amongst them who were alone
capable of great creative spiritual life. They seemed
to feel the tiding of the subtlest energy in the universe,
and gave the impulses to most spiritual advance.

Here and there in other civilisations was bred a
nature that had fitful consciousness of this divine
medium, at times through great creative imagination,
but oftener through noble life. Such a nature is
spoken of as inspired; and so far is it true in that it
has come into communication with the most refined
and most creative medium of the universe, that through
which what we call the divine seems to work; but only
through patient self-moulding and development has it
reached such a height of nobleness. Oftenest in past
ages these natures have folind shelter in religion; for
in the world ambition must make use of the coarsest
tools and the grossest energies to reach its aim; and
the growth of a loftier spirit is at once checked, and
noble aspiration stifled. Peace and the shadow of de
votional thought were the only conditions allowing
such a nature any scope in a world based upon war
and guided in its search for the right by might alone.

It was different with lyimanoran civilisation. There
it was the rule, and not the exception, to raise the
spiritual energies to sympathy with the diviner media
of the cosmos, and every condition favoured the pur-
suit. Life began with but a fitful consciousness of it,

39° Limanora

but it grew more continuous and surer. The young
could scarcely distinguish its impulses from those of
their own lower energies. But the old had seldom any
hesitation as to when they were inspired; they seemed
to keep in touch with all that is divine in the world.
They needed no retreat, no religious shelter, to nurse
the magnetic sympathy with the divine. Their affinity
to it grew more and more the essence of their being,
without ever having to leave their daily routine of
duties. It was this that gave them their wisdom and
character, and that made the young feel them to be
almost a type apart from the ordinarily human. They
became more distinct and striking in their personality
as they grew older and felt this affinity. It had come
to be a common observation of daily life that the nobler
the aspirations and the closer the intercourse with the
ethical media of the cosmos, the stronger and more
distinctive was the character; and science was not far
from the conclusion that on this intercourse depended
persistence of individuality, and that the higher they
reached in their sympathies with the more refined
media of the universe, the less need was there of change
in their personality at death, of making alliance with
other lower energies when they shed their inferior and
earthly forms of energy.

There was, they felt, a noble isolation or apartness
of spirit in their old men and women which raised them
above common humanity, and made the human body
seem an incongruous garment for their soul. They
lived above the demands of their corporeal energies
rather than in them or by them. In the young the
two seemed blended together; it was difficult often to
distinguish in them the movements of the two types of
energy. But in the old, though the corporeal had

Death 391

been raised and etherealised, it seemed to hang on the
skirts of the spiritual and try to drag it down; it bore
its earthly origination more manifestly on it in com-
parison with the nobler refinement of the spiritual.
And the longer they lived, the stronger the contrast
became, till at last nature herself seemed to demand
their eternal divorce. Euthanasia at a certain stage in
the development of Limanoran life came to be not so
much a privilege as a holy duty. To liberate the
higher energy from its alliance with the lower, to die,
was but the next and most natural stage in the evolu-
tion of the life. Even the family, who would feel the
bereavement most in the loss of their wise help and
guidance, acquiesced gladly, feeling that the liberation
must mean a nobler career for the released spiritual
energy. Thus it was that on Doomalona they used
the music of creation; they gave utterance to their
feeling that death was not dissolution but creation,
that the retrogression of the body was an advance for
the higher energy, the truer self. The sense of decay
or degeneration was quite absent from their thoughts.
It was a triumphal farewell; for they were convinced
that for the liberated it was the noblest deed of all to
die, the very crown of all their life.

CHAPTER IV

AN EPIDEMIC

HPHOUGHT by thought I ejected my old view of
1 death from my mind. I could not forget the
scene of triumph which had been enacted on the hill
of farewells; and the chanting that rilled through it
haunted my imagination, bringing a sense of satisfac-
tion, if not joy. I got into the habit of winging my
exercise-flights towards Doomalona. I was there with
Thyriel when dawn struck the world into gladness and
music. There were we together to see the flaming
picture the set of sun drew on Lilaroma. No platform
on the island so caught the inspiration of the coming
or departing orb. None, I came to feel, was so fitted
for the hegira of earth- weary souls. No such launch-
ing-ground was there for the voyage through infinity.
As I frequented it in my leisure moments, there grew
into my system the sense that death was not so much
an end as a beginning, not a dissolution, but a birth
and perhaps a forgetting. More and more was the
idea of it a nucleus of delight; and the old melancholy
and sorrow, making it a burden and a terror for the
mind, disappeared.

As a proselyte to the new feeling I was eager to talk
of it and make much of its surprises. Not with Thyriel

392

An Epidemic 393

and my proparents alone did I discuss its varied aspects;
I could listen by the hour to their teachings. But it
brought me into intercourse with many whom I had
scarcely seen before except in the course of my educa-
tion as I wandered through the various halls. I was
astonished to find how often they sought opportunity
to talk to me. They drew me aside as if they had im-
portant business with me, and confidentially imparted
their views of death which I had heard a hundred
times from others, until I grew weary of their chatter,
for I wished to talk myself. But they would not allow
me to break in on their everlasting torrent of babble;
even Thyriel could not endure my interruptions.
Though I never grew weary of her talk, I could not
restrain the desire to have my say, too. There was no
subject on which we could not soliloquise by the hour,
but we preferred to talk of death, the freshest and most
joyous of topics. And every other youth was just as
eager to deliver his opinions to me and to everybody
else. However busy they might be with the task in
hand, off they would break from it for colloquy, which
soon spun itself into the soliloquy of the stronger lungs
and the most enduring tongue. Everyone seemed to
comport himself as if his views were of the utmost im-
portance to the world. They all seemed bursting with
the obvious; out it must come or they would die. In
every other corner I would find two or three debating
with faces all aglow, sometimes in the most confidential
whispers; approaching to listen, I would find their
topic trite and stale as last year's gossip; the speaker
was pressing home on his hearers in a voice of por-
tentous awe what no one would think of disputing.

The elders interfered and tried by patient advice to
stop this tempest of loquacity. Hurrying from post to

394 Limanora

post they tried to keep the young at their work, but it
was an endless task. On would go the glib current as
soon as their attention was turned elsewhere. Matters
began to look serious, for the work of the community
was being neglected. The ordinary services of life
were barely performed. Little or no progress could
be made in such a state of affairs. Indeed, it became
manifest that the main aim of the race, progress, would
soon be forgotten, and retrogression supervene. The
faces of the elders became graver every day; their
advice was unheeded, their example unfollowed. Bab-
ble, babble, babble, on rolled the fluent river of talk,
as if the island had been in the midst of Western civil-
isation. When I closed my eyes so loud and empty
sounded the magpie babel I could easily fancy myself
back again in my native land, and believe that I had
dreamt my recent years and wakened again in Christ-
endom.

The ominous gravity of the elders dispelled the
fancy. They looked as if doomsday were near, and
were often heard to say that something must be done.
For the talkativeness was bringing other vices in its
train, — vanity, flippancy, carelessness, and want of
reason. The torrent of eloquence was spreading wider
every day and seemed to have broken down the pales
of their long centuries of civilisation. No one was
capable of stopping it either by precept or example.

At last in their despair the elders appealed to the
medicants. Nothing like the phenomenon had oc-
curred within the memory of the oldest; nothing in
the records could be found that in the least resembled
it since the series of exilings had been completed. At
the periodical inspection, the medicants made a more
minute investigation of the systems of the youth and

An Epidemic 395

turned their attention especially to the left side of the
brain, which is the great originator and controller of
speech. In a few they could see evidences of in-
flammation and morbid secretion in the brain-tissue
of this region; in most cases nothing out of the com-
mon revealed itself to their most recent lavolans. So
they took careful electrographs of the left side of the
brain of most of them, and when they put these under
their strongest clirolans, it became plain that all of them
were in a diseased condition.

The elders were now convinced that they were on
the right track of investigation, and all the young peo-
ple who had shown symptoms of the passion for elo-
quence were isolated and brought hourly under the
inspection of the medicauts. Moving electrographs
of the thought-processes in the diseased parts were
taken daily by means of modifications of the lavolan;
and under still more powerful clirolans, made for the
purpose, these revealed a microbe of extraordinary
minuteness at work in the tissue. Having found the
source of the mischief, they set themselves to remove
it. At first they put the patient into profound sleep,
and, trephining the skull, they cleansed away under
the clirolan all traces of the parasite and its debris.
What they removed they carefully preserved and
analysed; then, having found the chemical elements
of the mischievous spawn and their debris, they repro-
duced the mixture as a cure of the new and singular
disease. For a time this was administered as an in-
ternal medicine; but finding that it injured other
nerve-centres besides those that they intended to affect,
they resolved to apply it only locally, and soon learned
how to avoid the necessity of trephining the skull.
They invented an electric syringe and injector, which

Limanora

caused the mixture to penetrate through the skull into
the part of the brain affected, thus sterilising the tissues
that had to do with speech and making them unattrac-
tive as a feeding-ground for the microbe of loquacity.

The plague soon vanished and the babel ceased.
There was comparative silence throughout the island.
Only such words were spoken as were essential and
relevant to the business in hand. It was, indeed, ac-
cepted as the surest mark of the sanity of a nature that
it was never betrayed into speech unless that which
conveyed necessary information, forceful reasoning, or
fresh thought. The trite was avoided as mephitic
vapours or an exhausted atmosphere would be. The
utterance of truisms immediately led to a microscopic
examination of the brain of the speaker in expectation
of finding disease there. The habit of expression
merely for its own sake and not for what it expressed,
for its beauty or wit or pungency, was considered a
sure indication of a diseased or morbid condition of the
brain-tissue, and the sufferer was at once isolated for
treatment, lest he should spread the contagion.

For the whole phenomenon was scientifically investi-
gated, and precautions were carefully taken against a
return of the plague. It had been noticed that, after
any age of exceptional progress, there generally oc-
curred some epidemic connected with the brain-tissues
or nerve-centres, sometimes appearing in excess of emo-
tion, sometimes in various forms of feebleness of
thought. It was due, they found, to the comparative
exhaustion of the brain and nerves by exceptional
strain upon them. As long as the enthusiasm of the
new ideas and rapid advance inspired the people, they
worked with a will, nor ever thought of sparing any
part of their system. The more mature amongst them

An Epidemic 397

knew how to bridle this passion for work, and took
the necessary precautions against its evil effects; from
experience they had found out that they needed more
sustenance and more sleep in such periods, and they
knew almost by instinct when to rest and how often,
and what halls of sustenance and medication they
should frequent. The young had not their instincts
checked or confirmed by experience, and carried even
the best of movements and impulses to abuse. In
spite of inspection and superintendence they ignored
the rules laid down for their guidance, and took their
inspiration to work as better than the wisdom of their
elders, knowing that progress was the ideal and law of
their race, and thinking that everything done for pro-
gress was right.

It was thus the young and immature who generally
suffered from these epidemics. The impulse of their
enthusiasm carried them far beyond the limits of fer-
tility of their tissues, and the ebullience of their delight,
as they saw the work grow before their eyes, obscured
from them the gradual exhaustion of their powers.
They grew oblivious to everything but the end they
had immediately in view, and thus became short-
sighted in their enthusiasm for progress; they sacrificed
the demands of the future for the sake of the present,
and it was difficult for even the elders at the medical
inspection to get at the real state of the case, such an
appearance of new vigour did the impetuosity of their
passion and the tumult in their blood give to their sys-
tems. Only when the wandering germs of emotional
disease had fixed on the exhausted tissue did the result
become apparent.

The wide area and serious effects of the plague of
verbosity awakened the medical elders to the necessity

398 Limanora

of special precautions. A section of them was organised
as a medical police to guard against the invasion of such
pestilences, and to prevent such exhaustion of youthful
tissues as would invite the vagrant germs or fail to re-
pel their attacks. A science was specialised for this
purpose, — the pathology of epidemic emotions; and a
special art grew up to correspond, — the hygiene and
therapeutics of emotional infection.

The elders who attended to this periodically made
careful examination of all the tissue of the immature
that had to do with emotion or with any crude spiritual
moods inapt to the control of reason and will. And it
was astonishing how rapid was the growth of the new
science and art in their hands. Delicate instruments
were invented responding to the presence even in
the air of deleterious germs that tended to settle in the
nerve-centres. Still finer instruments revealed the
state of the tissues underneath the skull. The symp-
toms of every disease of the emotions were classified,
and the means of checking each was investigated scien-
tifically. Before the next period of exceptional flor-
escence and harvest arrived, the hygiene of all the
epidemics that had been known to follow on ages of
great exertion was completely organised; and it was
chiefly an art of prevention rather than of cure. Pre-
cautions were taken by the new section of the medicants
against the abuse of the enthusiasm natural to such a
period ; they examined the nerve-tissues of the imma-
ture almost daily, and pointed out everyone that was
getting overworked, and the remedies that should be
adopted for checking the evil. The result was that no
abuse could proceed for longer than a day, and no
moral or emotional epidemic unless of the mildest type
could settle in the community.

An Epidemic 399

What roused them to such a step as the foundation
of a new science and art was the seriousness with which
they viewed the last plague, that of loquacity. In the
series of exilings no evil had given them such trouble
as that of oratory, and they were afraid lest it was
about to return in all its virulence. At first they feared
this plague to be a case of atavism; for those whom it
attacked earliest were descendants of ancestors, or
closely related to families, that had been famous in the
far past for power of expression. But it soon spread to
strains of blood that had been marked by great reti-
cence, if not taciturnity, and ultimately it was com-
pletely impartial in its choice of victims. It was
manifest, however, that those who had ancestral oratory
in the blood were first open to the attacks of the plague
and were most difficult to cure; and the phenomenon
sent alarm to the very heart of the community. All
the mature citizens and especially the elders looked
graver than I had ever seen them look, even at the
prospect of Choktroo's invasion; they came nearer to
the appearance of dejection than I had imagined they
could come.

The whole matter drove my thoughts to work. When
I reflected on the occasion, the attitude my mind had
been accustomed to in my forgotten life returned, and
it seemed to me as if there had been a storm over no-
thing. Talkativeness had been one of the commonest
features of the men and women I had known in Kurope;
and loquacity was as little noticed as a red head or a
pug nose. Indeed the chatterbox was ranked among
the innocents who did little harm except to their own
reputations. It became a complete puzzle to me, when
I saw the horror with which the Limanoraus looked on

400 Limanora

oratory. Had it not been one of the greatest of the
arts of Christendom ? Were not the great orators of
my own nation looked upon as little short of inspired,
and their statues placed in the noblest niche of our
temple of fame ? Did we not rush by the thousand to
hear any one of them, when he was about to perform,
and stand breathless by the hour, laying up for our-
selves fatigue and faintness and asphyxia, merely for
the delight of hanging on his lips? In life he roused
hurricanes of enthusiasm; and when he died thousands
who had never known him personally followed him
mourning to the tomb, and on the most revered page
of our literature was his name written. What could be
the meaning of so hearty a detestation of so noble an
art on the part of this progressive race ?

As usual I had not long to wait for a solution. My
bewilderment had already stirred the curiosity of my
proparents and Thyriel; and they had been watching
my thoughts for some time before I put my questions,
simple enough for my young comrade and betrothed to
answer. She spent a whole afternoon that was de-
voted to flight-exercise, in discussing and solving my
difficulties, and the struggle ended in strengthening
my admiration for this noble people.

Their abhorrence of the vice of oratory was not the
growth of any sudden revolution, or the unreasoning
prejudice often originating amongst a long-established
nation in some great personal hatred or fear now buried
in oblivion. It was the result of ages of the most
patient scientific investigation. And it found its way
into practice so slowly that the steps up to the final one
are scarcely noticeable on the pages of their history.
It had an inborn prejudice in favour of oratory to com-
bat, all the deeper that it could not explain itself or its

An Epidemic

origin. The reputation of some of the ablest and most
influential sections of the community was based upon
the art. The orators of the nation had acquired a fame
almost greater than that of the soldiers. They had
been its leaders and founders; they had developed and
mastered its politics; they had moulded the people at
certain crises in their history into a unity. Their art
had been enrolled for ages amongst the noblest they
had. It was the only civilised force which could move
great masses to enthusiasm, or fuse their varied pur-
poses and thoughts together to form a single ideal and
aim. It was the only means their statesmen had
had for accomplishing their schemes, the only step-
ping-stones by which their lawyers and preachers and
politicians could rise to fame. It seemed for ages a
hopeless task to unseat it from its place in their civilis-
ation, or eradicate the prejudice in its favour from the
people's minds.

The wisest Limanoraus had watched its evil in-
fluence through many ages; although they had. often
themselves to make use of it for their purposes of re-
form and although some of the best men had been suc-
cessful in its employment, yet they were certain that it
sapped the finer sense of truth. So easily could the
orator persuade a crowd to accept all he said as true
and noble that he came to think there was little differ-
ence between the true and the false, the noble and the
ignoble; his own aim was all that was of significance,
and it was, however selfish or mean, just as good as
anybody else's aim. He needed as little to persuade
himself of the justice of an evil cause, provided it was
his own, as to persuade an assembly. He had but
to isolate certain facts and phases, and what were
antagonistic to them fell into shadow; the unjust

402 Limanora

course began to appear just, and those who opposed
it were the enemies of justice and of the orator. It
mattered not what side he took, if only it stirred his
interest; he could rouse thousands to enthusiasm for it
by touching their emotions and awakening the passions
that were connected with their own self-interest. This
power of moving great masses to whatever tune he
pleased gave the orator a sense of omnipotence; after
a stirring speech he felt like a Jove who held in his
hand the destinies of the world. Happily for the wel-
fare of the state, the tongue-doughty was hopelessly
incapable when he turned to practice; he could not
organise the crusade he had preached; everything he
did with his crowd of followers tumbled to pieces as
soon as he had to do anything further than speak; a
few days or even hours of cool action revealed the hol-
lowness of his cause or his power; the omnipotent Jove
of yesterday appeared the skulking slave of to-day.
The only crusades that ever prospered under his in-
fluence were those which aimed at destruction; for the
work of destruction is brief and sharp; it needs but the
passion of the moment to accomplish it; and the love
of demolition is the most primitive of all savage de-
sires, and the most unbridled when let loose; its own
action as it proceeds kindles into a conflagration the
fires that give it strength. Creation is a calm and
gradual process, the last conquest of the human mind,
as it is the highest function of the energy of the cosmos.
The wrecking Omnipotence of oratory is parted from
this by the eternity of cosmic development; it is kin
with the clashing of worlds and systems that may come
before the birth of a universe; but it is as opposite
in nature to the slow building up of a world and the
slow evolution of its life-energy as hell is to heaven.

An Epidemic 4°3

The barrenness of the art in all that would develop
humanity struck even the less mature minds of L,ima-
nora forcibly as soon as vast schemes of reform like
socialism began to be discussed. These schemes meant
the devastation or the dismantling of existing institu-
tions and systems of life. A plague of demagogues
spread throughout the nation. Hitherto orator had
neutralised orator as in a debate. Now it was the idle
and indolent who grew most tongue-valiant. They,
who had before been so discredited, now found them-
selves on the way to fame. They, who had before been
able to gather only a few embeggared discontents at
the street-corners to listen, and perhaps to sniff at their
eloquence, could now stir masses to action. They had
been despised even by their out-at-elbows followers for
their impotence in face of the problem of making a bare
living for themselves. Now they saw before them
place and power, fortune and fame, and all through this
poor member of theirs that had not been able to earn
enough to lick. Beggarly grovellers, none so poor as
not to scorn them, they were now omnipotent, with
all the work of devastation before them that these new
vast political schemes implied. When the revolution
was in full blaze, they were at their best, they thought.
But it was just at this point they found their limit.
The conflagration they had kindled their eloquence
failed to control or even guide; it swept past them
through institutions and sections of the community
that they specially favoured; and at last even they,
many of them, fell themselves victims to its undiscrim-
inating ravage. And, when it had burned itself out,
not one of them but skulked away in fear, unable to
face the task of building up again. Then it was the
man of action that stepped in, the silent, masterful

404 Limanora

disciplinarian, moulded in war and accustomed to no
other means of solving human problems than war; he it
was who reaped the dragon 's-teeth harvest sown by
tongue- bravery : he seized all the glory and place and
fortune that the mob-spaniels had thought within their
grasp. Some of their ancient folk-maxims embodied
this experience: The breath of the demagogue blows
the warrior to his fortune; The mouth of the orator is
the banqueting-chamber of the soldier; Tempests of
eloquence and torrents of blood; Spout, vain tongue,
you invite your tyrant; Sow a country with the teeth
of haranguers and they will come up the swords of
despots; Loquacity is eaten up by her son pugnacity.

In spite of the fear of the art indicated in such folk-
lore, it continued to flourish; for the upper classes,
who delighted in war, flattered themselves that they
would ever be the best orators, and it is the inevitable
tendency of human nature to run to tongue. Not till
the age of unbridled freedom of speech did they begin
to change their opinions. Then were they easily out-
faced and out-harangued by any idler of the poverty-
stricken districts. Even in their own assemblies they
were no match for the spoil ters from the slums; with
all their high-toned irony and scornful superiority, they
were beaten into silence at the public palavers; they
were mere stammerers beside the glib orators of the un-
washed. This age of tongue-exploits was naturally an
age of single ideas, too. When their energy had gone
into speech, they had none left for thoughts. One-idea
crusades became the order of the day. Every tongue-
quixote had his scheme wherewith he would sweep all
evils out of life. He was so enamoured of his own that
he could not bear to listen to any other. And therein
lay safety.

An Epidemic 405

But there came a time when the wordy bravos joined
forces; one vast socialistic scheme included all theirs.
The institutions of the island were to be wiped out, and
something undefined that was to make men equal and
prosperous and happy was to be put in their place.
Their tongues now wagged in unison with wonderful
velocity. Each was still for his own special construct-
ive scheme, but they were at one in their scheme of
demolition; they must have a clear space to build on,
and their ideal was the same, to make all equal and
happy. The babel of eloquence drowned the sounds
of other industry. Another revolution was almost
within earshot.

Some of the wiser hearts of Limanora anticipated the
danger, and saw that it would be better to give the dis-
contented all than to let destruction ravage unmuzzled
again. The whole of the property of the island was
estimated, land, houses, furniture, and luxuries; and
money equivalent to its full value was handed over to
the malcontent socialists to divide amongst themselves,
provided they migrated to another island. The offer
was readily accepted; for it was clear that nothing
would then be left in Umanora worth plundering. The
ships landed the enraptured equalisers of human goods
with their belongings on the shore of their new Eden,
and returned.

When the decks were cleared, and a census was
taken of all that remained, it was found that the island
in purging out the socialists was rid of the plague of
orators. The price they paid for their deliverance was
small indeed, they felt. They soon recreated the
wealth they had surrendered. Everyone grew ashamed
and afraid of anything that approached to oratory.
Eloquence became a word of evil omen. To prate was

406 Limanora

now the greatest offence against the commonwealth.
And for generations there reigned comparative silence
and complete peace over the land.

In the series of purgations every remaining trace of
tongue-ambition was swept out. Much of the flatter-
ing kind was found to have migrated with the lecher-
ous; much of the haughty kind with the aristocratic
warriors; but most of it went with the liars. There
remained a horror of all prating and tongue-valiance,
and this repressed every atavistic tendency in that
direction that appeared.

CHAPTER V

LITERATURE

ALL mere word-mongering was to this people an
immoral thing, a shameless waste of the tissue
and energy that were needed by the evolution of the
race, an offence against its aim and ideal, its progress
upwards through the cosmic grades. They were per-
suaded that it was a base substitution of the shows of
life for the reality to make an art of words which should
absorb the imagination and the skill of hundreds for
their whole lifetime. They would have nothing to do
with attention to the appearance and ornamentation of
a subject to the neglect of its true spirit. Into the very
heart and purpose of life every worker must penetrate.
His relation to the progress of the race must be clearly
shown. No work that took up any of the time or
energy of anyone of the community was to be useless
or unfertile.

But this did not mean that language was allowed to
take care of itself. It was one of the most diligently
tended blossoms of human capacity. No word or
phrase, whether spontaneous or invented, was allowed
to take root without the fiat of the mature community.
Language was more a public institution than even gov-
ernment or justice in a people whose every member

407

408 Limanora

was able to be a law to himself. It was not only the
great channel of communication; it was the medium
and garment of every thought. If it became corrupt,
how could the mind itself be saved from its contagion ?
If it acquired a false tone, how could the falsity fail to
enter into the very spirit of the men and women ? It
was the guardian of law and truth; it was the key to
the human heart; it was the ether, the medium, in
which the human mind lived, moved, and had its
being.

How could such a potent factor in human progress
be left to the caprices of accident, or of single persons,
or even of a family ? It had more influence over the
spirit than all their sciences put together, for it was
more universal in its use than any one of them ; and it
subtly tinged all of them, whilst it was almost the
breath of the mind which dealt with them. It might
be the life or the poison of the whole race. He who
was the sole guide of language would be the master of
Limanora, not in the shallow sense of a ruler, but in
that of the complete arbiter of its destinies. He would
be the despot of the Limanoran mind and might subtly
throw it back centuries, if it pleased him.

A people so experienced and wise as this would have
ruined the whole ideal of their existence if they had
allowed the most public of the functions of their civil-
isation to move at the caprice of individuals. As soon
as the purgation of the race had been completed it be-
came plain that their language must be purified too.
Hundreds of words and phrases and idioms had had
soaked into them the infiltrations of the evil minds
which were now banished. Worse than all, language
had been the commonest and safest ambush of malignity
and deceit; it had been a perpetual trap for the inno-

Literature 4°9

cent and unwary; it had been a labyrinth, in which
even the ablest and purest-minded often lost their
way when following the lead of some great and noble
thought.

The first aim of the elders was to clear it of coarse or
vulgar suggestion. But, as they proceeded, they found
their horizon widen; and the intricacies, ambiguities,
and pitfalls showed themselves the most serious evils
of all. It became absolutely necessary, if they were to
have a clear and unrefractive medium of expression, to
give a definite meaning to every word, and to have one
word for every meaning or shade of meaning. The
task extended itself through years. But then they
knew that, until it was thoroughly done, their science
would be like shifting clouds, and their progress would
be over quicksands. If their language was treacherous,
their civilisation was but a mirage. So they toiled on
sustained by the hope that they were making sure their
footsteps in the pursuit of truth.

When their work was done, they found it was only
begun. For it took n generation to make the new and
purified language the natural medium of the whole
people, and by that time new sub-meanings had crept
into most of the common words, and new shadings had
discoloured most of the everyday phraseology. The
new and less used words, and the purely technical and
scientific words stood where they were. Everything
that lived had shifted ground. Everything that was
purely artificial and had taken no root had remained
as it began, had been in short petrified. It was clear
that with living language there must be perpetual vigil-
ance and superintendence. And the whole people had
to become a council for the preservation of its purity
and transl licence. Every citizen set a watch upon his

Limanora

words, as he used them from day to day or as he heard
them used, and reported any drift in the sense and any
new shade of meaning ; and after deliberation in council
and careful consideration by the elders a new form was
moulded for each new signification. This form had to
pass the ordeal of universal use for some time, and if it
stood the test, it was finally accepted as part of the
language.

Nor was it ever forgotten that the ear and the sense
of harmony had as much to do with the acceptance of
a word as its fitness to express an idea. Harsh sounds
wasted valuable tissue as much as unmeaning syllables.
The verbal atrocities of Western science would have
made the Limanorans shudder. Dissonance was an
offence against the spirit of harmony which pervaded
the cosmos; it was as easy to form a melodious word or
phrase as one that was grating or stridulous. Euphony,
it seemed to them, was one of the first essentials of a
language; and it was much pleasanter to be silent than
to talk unmusically. There had grown up an instinct
in them that moulded their sentences into what Euro-
peans would have called poems. The barest statement
of fact ran with a liquid sweetness that drew the ear
like a piece of beautiful music. The strictest scientific
discourse sounded to me as majestic and melodious as
some of the greatest passages in our Western poets.
Their most ordinary conversation had the liquid har-
mony of our finest lyrics without the monotonous
rhythm, the jingling rhyme, or the mincing gait. It
never struck them that there should be a special art of
words apart from that skill which all had by instinct
whenever there was a thought to express. If it were
a perfectly new thought, a discovery or invention that
was still unnamed, then it was the duty of the whole

Literature 411

people to make or approve of a word which would ex-
actly fit it. Loose-fitting language soon meant loose,
shambling thought, and it was one of their foremost
responsibilities as a race to see that no one of them was
driven into that. The appearance of a special literary
art, for which some were specially gifted, would have
told them at once that their language was disorganised
and that the first great public need was its reform.

For a time after my arrival in the island I was ac-
customed to speak with admiration of the great litera-
tures of Europe, one of the few features of our Western
civilisation which I felt it no shame to mention. I
would launch into glowing praises of the beauty and
aptness of the expression, the nobleness of the music,
and the majesty and harmony of each work. When I
spoke of Homer and ^schylus, of Dante and Milton,
of Shakespeare and Goethe, I was unbounded in my
admiration of their lofty genius in the management of
their material. Questioned as to the character of their
thoughts, I contended that there was no need for these
to be absolutely new; the greatest merit of such poets
was that they took the wisdom of their age or country,
or the wisdom of all ages and countries, and expressed
it in a way that was inimitable. Their material they
had gathered from books or from the experience of their
time; and most of their great poems had been analysed
by admiring commentators into their original elements;
the source from which almost every idea had been
taken could be pointed out. But this was only to en-
hance the value of their work, to increase their great-
ness. It was one of the commonest observations
amongst literary men in the West, when defending
themselves against the charge of plagiarism, that there
was no such thing as absolute originality of idea or

412 Limanora

material; the great merit in literature, the test of its
lastingness, was the originality or freshness of expres-
sion; the rest belonged to the age or people in which
it was produced, or to mankind of all ages and nations.
And young men and women were encouraged to learn
foreign languages, and especially the classical tongues,
at all hazards, because translations missed what was
distinctive in the great authors; if they would enjoy
the true flavour of their originality, they must learn
and study the language of the great books for them-
selves.

I found my efforts to communicate my enthusiasm all
in vain. I was met by a look of pity in the eyes of my
listeners, and soon came to know the source and mean-
ing of the emotion. They were sorry that I should
continue to admire that which was the symptom of a
diseased condition, and they commiserated the retro-
grade state of so many millions of the inhabitants of
the globe, who could spend some of the best moments
and feelings of their lives on what was merely super-
ficial. They sympathised with the effort to live in a
world of thought, a spiritual world, a nobler existence
than that of eating and drinking; this was a sign of a
yearning for advance. But they grieved that it should
take such a mistaken direction, that their fellow-men
in the West should glory in what was an evidence of
disease. Language was singularly disordered, when
only a few could be found throughout the ages with
the capacity to use it aptly and musically. Where
was the wisdom that guided the people, if it could let
this greatest instrument and medium of thought remain
so chaotic and infirm that whosoever was skilled in
fit and melodious use of it was held to be inspired ?
Surely it was the first care of the elders and governors

Literature 413

to see that the universal means of communication was
at least unambiguous and explicit. The highway of
thought was left a jungle, primeval and inarticulate as
the intercourse of animals; and one who made a clear
track through any part of the labyrinth was lauded as
divine. The literature of Europe was evidently but
the outcome of the incapacity of its people for proper
self-government. That only a few should be able to
write or speak in so clear and fitting a way was a dis-
grace to the civilisation. To honour them so greatly
as the people did revealed the depths of incapacity
into which all had fallen, and the corrupt state of the
language.

I urged the marvellous power of suggestion that
European words had in the hands of the poets. They
bore so many sub-meanings and branches of meaning
that the full depths of a poem or great prose work
were never sounded. Age after age of students could
go on studying it and still find in it new significance,
new inspiration. Commentary after commentary had
been written on the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and
Shakespeare's plays, without exhausting all the mean-
ing they had in them. Vast libraries of interpret-
ation of them had accumulated, and yet every new age
found opportunity for additions to them. This was
due to the subtle under-meanings that touched innumer-
able keys in the soul, and played upon a vast variety of
emotions. An able writer could bring words together
so aptly as to affect different minds in different ways.
A nebulous significance gathered round his phrases
and sentences, and out of this a hundred scholars
would make each his own discovery. Mystically lay
the thoughts in the depths of his words, ready for the
profounder students to fathom. And so every great

4H Limanora

poem inspired age after age in a thousand different
directions. Would this have been the case, if every
word had been made to serve but one purpose, if
every phrase had been unequivocal in meaning, and
every sentence unshaded and perspicuous ? It was the
play of meaning, the opalescent glimmer of light in lan-
guage that rendered European poetry so beautiful and
undyiiigly suggestive. It was the twilight of words that
gave such majestic and shadowy forms to the ideas and
characters and scenes of the great poems of the past.
And what would the generations of scholars and teach-
ers have done without these hidden meanings to reveal
in their literature, without these intricacies to disen-
tangle, without these dim allusions and adumbrations
of sense to make clear ? Where would our youth have
found their intellectual training, if all our great litera-
ture had been transparent and precise in meaning ?

I thought I had made out a splendid case for our
European tongues. But a glance at the face of my
querist served to scatter my vanity to the winds. There
was the same inscrutable look of pity in the eyes.
Everything I had pleaded, as I thought, so eloquently
had only deepened the Limanoran view of the shame-
ful waste of talent which the undefined and perpetually
shifting sense of European words produced in the West.
There must the ablest minds of most generations
wrestle all their lives with the loose-jointed languages
they had to employ, and try to get their benediction
and inspiration into form for the ages to wrestle with.
There must thousands of capable men and women
waste their best years in searching for recondite mean-
ings in the works these have produced. There must
all the immature minds spend their youth on the hated,
barren task of trying to grasp the mirage of sense in

Literature 4r5

the books they learn. What progress would there not
have been in Europe if all this talent and energy and
time had been saved for the real work of life, if all the
best thinkers she produced had been set to the labour
of true discovery ? It was little wonder that her civil-
isation was practically unprogressive, when so much
of it was built on the quicksands of her language. All
the shades and suggestions of meaning were but pitfalls
wherein most of her men and women foundered on the
journey of life. It was with mere shadows and shows
that her greatest minds fought ; they were not conquer-
ing the. unknown and undiscovered that their fellow-
men might advance in their footsteps. The night
encircled them as deeply as before their preternatural
efforts. How could the blind lead the blind in a land
covered with mists and full of pitfalls ?

I had still a few arrows in my quiver, I thought. No
one could deny the beauty of the literary art and the
training it gave to the sense of what was fair and noble.
Where will one find anything so melodious as our great
poems ? Where anything so harmonious as the prose
of our finest stylists ? A beautiful lyric can hold a na-
tion entranced. A fine piece of prose can stir thousands
to admiration. What could be more ennobling than
the effect of our greatest poems on the youth of our
nations, what more refining than the study of our great
prose- writers ?

Again I knew how far beside the mark I had shot.
Style was but the effort of a language to throw off its
diseases, an acknowledgment of the gross imperfections
that burdened it and made it a clog on the progress of
thought. If a language were what it ought to be, a
precise means of intercourse between soul and soul, a
true medium of intellectual energy, then ought the

4i 6 Limanora

race that uses it to be completely unconscious of any-
thing like style. We never know we breathe, or how
we breathe, till some stoppage makes breathing diffi-
cult; we never realise we have a heart whose pulsa-
tions are essential to life, till it beats irregularly, and
alarms us with the prospect of disease in it. So it is
with speech, the instrument of communication among
men, the ether of thought; did it perform all its func-
tions in a healthy and perfect way, we should pay little
or no attention to it; were words unambiguous and
precise, every man would speak and write in the best
of all styles, that natural and transpicuous method of
expression which fixes the whole mind of the listener
or reader, not on the means of conveyance, but on the
energy that passes through it. Speech should be no
more than one of the unpremeditated, unguided func-
tions of our system; as soon as it calls for attention, it
is deranged; as long as we are unconscious of it, it is
healthful and strong, acting in every way as it should,
without shadow or broken light, without indefinite-
ness of meaning or mistaken suggestion.

Nor should a language even in its commonest thor-
oughfares be devoid of music. How false must be the
rendering of a thought, if for the sake of melody he
who is called a poet should have to reject all but musi-
cal expressions in a language which has little music in
it! How artificial must be the labours of this profes-
sional word-monger, when he must sit amongst the
debris of his vocabulary, and pick and choose with
weary exertion the words that will fit into his poem !
With most of his language unsuited to his purpose, as
being invented or moulded by unmusical people, he is
like a mosaic- worker who has to make his work out of
common stone, or out of fragments of pottery thrown

Literature 41?

into the rubbish-heap of the ages. Most languages
sound like the rasping of a file over iron, or the shoot-
ing of debris over a precipice, or at best the crackle and
hiss of fireworks. And it is not surprising; for their
individual words are made out of anything that is ready
to hand by men who care nothing for the sound of them,
whether it is harsh or melodious. Now and again if a
word or phrase becomes current out of the range of
literary products, it will get its harsh grating syllables
ground off, or rounded and polished in the torrent of
common speech. Thus are prepared the only elements
of the language that are fit for the fine mosaic- work of
Western poets. They rescue these time-smoothed
pebbles from their gross or vulgar surroundings and
place them in a setting that will make them seem
beautiful for a time.

It is only fora time; again the fair structure they
have made falls into ruin, and fragments are whirled
into the eddies of everyday speech and abandon their
beauty of form and meaning for something their original
maker would never recognise. Then begins the old
process; the debris of forgotten works, rounded and
smoothed in the current of time, serves as the rubble
to be concreted into the artistic works of a new age.
Alas for the artists who have such a task before them !
Out of the rubbish heap of the past they must mould
what will please the new times. And where is there
room for true harmony iji the result of such a process ?
The materials depend for their form on the caprice of
chance; the artists depend for the form they give on
the caprice of the age in which they work, certain to
be antiquated by the next new fashion. As long as
a literary product depends on its form for its lasting

effect, it must be comparatively ephemeral; for form is
27

4i8

Limanora

nothing if it does not suit the fancy of the age to which
it appeals, and the fancy of one age conflicts with most
others. Artificial means may seem to keep it alive, an
ecclesiastical or political movement, the aid of an ex-
traneous art, or the ambition of scholars and critics;
but the life is only galvanic, and not from the heart of
the people. No true music can come out of that which
is essentially unmusical.

CHAPTER VI

INSPIRATION

{ABANDONED the effort to defend the literature
of Christendom, and came to the conclusion that a
people that so scorned all word-mongering could not
have any literature. I was soon disabused of the idea.
One day, after my education had advanced into the
final stage of its earlier course, and my loyalty to the
race had been tested in many ways, my proparents bade
me accompany them to the production of a new book.
After what I had heard in depreciation of literature
such as I had been accusomed to in Europe, I was
somewhat startled at this invitation. But they said
nothing to explain the anomaly, although they knew
well the nature of the discussion I had had with
Thyriel.

I had thought that, during my long residence in the
island and in my countless flights over it, I had come
to know every public institution existing on it. But I
was mistaken again. In our course we chose a direc-
tion that for a space was one I had several times taken.
But soon we bent out of the usual track up Lilaroma,
and turning one of its western spurs, made for a deep
valley which was concealed from view, except to voy-
agers towards the sunset. Here we found the air filled

419

420 Limanora

with wings and airships streaming onwards. It was a
beautiful sight, this navy of the sky fleeting across
the snows of Lilaroma, or winnowing the depths of
the azure. We had been on the adjoining coast of the
island, and had not to strike far upwards in order to
reach our destination. So the air-fleet moved far above
us, most of it having to round the heights of the gleam-
ing mountain. Nothing could surpass the grace with
which they took their way through the heaven, now to
this point, now to that; and after a time I could hear
the movement of their wings, like the rustle of silken
sails.

In gazing dreamily upwards, I had allowed myself to
drop too near the earth, and in order to reach the goal
of our flight exactly I had to take another long rise.
Thereafter my gaze was bent earthwards on a still
more beautiful sight beneath me. A broad valley nar-
rowed coastwards to a deep gorge and mountainwards
into a rift in the rocks. The river which had sculp-
tured this singular amphitheatre had been deflected by
an artificial channel into the centre of force, but was
allowed at times to sweep its old bed free of the debris
of rocks and vegetation. Up each side vibrated in the
air tier upon tier of their automatic rests, enough to
accommodate a nation. All lay open to the sky; yet
there was a subdued light down in the hollow of the
vale, that soothed the eyes tired with the gleam of the
blue and snow above; and this twilignt deepened into
gloom towards the head and the exit of the valley.
Only in the afternoon, as the sun westered, it shot its
level rays through the chasm at the entrance, and mel-
lowed the gloom even of the ravine at the upper end
with its golden light. And at sunset the concentration
of the many-coloured rays through the gorge had a

Inspiration 421

striking effect upon the whole amphiteatre ; it was as
if a theatrical artist were lighting it up for some super-
natural scene.

The afternoon sunlight indeed soon revealed to our
eyes, as we settled on the slopes, an immense stage
that shot out of the ravine on the mountain-side. It
was, I could see, the natural theatre of the island, cut
out by other than human powers. And from side to
side the gentlest whisper would carry, yet without re-
coil; while the sound of the moving stage, as it rolled
forth, rose along the tiers and without break or reper-
cussion died away into the open sky above our heads.
It must have been here, I thought, that the architects
of Limanoran buildings had learned the acoustic secrets
of nature. Never a sound was lessened or confused in
passing to the farthest corner of any of their vast halls.
Nor was it from any mechanical contrivance underneath
the roof, but simply from the shape of the enclosure.
Nature had formed this valley into a perfect theatre,
in the highest tier of which not one listener could miss
the smallest sound. Yet by a singular contrivance, by
means of which a globe of irelium was kept over the
stage, every sound was tenfold magnified lest the merest
whisper should escape, whilst every hearer had at hand
a margol, which would soften sounds that carried too
loudly to the ear. Another strange effect of this irelium
shell was that it magnified to the eye everything upon
the stage a hundredfold; it acted as a powerful micro-
scope, so that each spectator was far nearer to the inner
structure of any object than mere human eye-power
could bring him.

We had not to wait long for the purpose of these
preparations. There entered upon the stage two figures
that underneath the globe seemed gigantic beside the

422 Limanora

bodies of Limanoran men and women. They had
L,imanoran outlines, but transmuted into something
more ethereal than aught I had seen. There was a
grace of form and a beauty of face beyond any of those
around me on the slope of the hill. And even to my
eyes, untrained and limited as they were in their
powers, there was a transparency in the tissue of their
bodies which revealed the movements of their organs;
I saw their hearts pulsate, and the currents of the
blood move quicker or slower along their veins as they
walked or stood still. We could even watch the effect
of their emotions in their systems, and the excited or
tranquil movement of thoughts in the tissues of their
brains. The impulses that travelled along their nerves
from brain to hand or foot, and the reports that kept
journeying from the various senses to the nerve-centres,
seemed all to be made plain to us; and seemed the
work of a magician, so marvellous was it, so far above
mere human achievement.

But still greater marvels were to follow. These two
beings or automata or moving shadows of beings, or
whatever they might be, enacted a scene, the signifi-
cance of which I comprehended only after many days'
thought. My immediate impressions and my subse-
quent conclusions and knowledge have so amalgamated
that it is difficult to separate the two elements. These
two beings were chosen friends, the complements of
each other, with tendencies and tastes and loves all in
unison. Such perfect fitting of nature to nature was
not as yet to be found even in Limanora. Thought
sprang to thought, and emotion to emotion, and yet
there was a spontaneity and origination in both that
made each a separate fountain of life and action. How
independent the characters and powers, and yet how

Inspiration 423

mutually adapted ! The scene was meant to picture a
friendship that was a true and perfect marriage.

The two had grown year by year closer in harmony
till at last the mutual sympathy had culminated in a
yearning to see an individuality that would combine
the best peculiarities of each and perpetuate the combin-
ation. We could see the thought flame into a passion
in the two systems, and then we could hear the friends
talk around the longing till it grew definite, into a
common project. We saw them gather the materials
needed for the formation of the body. With intricacies
of furnace and crucible and machinery they moulded
these into the skeleton of a man, flawless and strong
in every part. They tried every bone with numberless
tests, till they found it all to their satisfaction. Then
they started on the cartilages that kept the bones in
place or moved them, giving permanence and life to
each, as they made it, by the magnetism they com-
municated to it. Tissue by tissue they built up the
internal organs, modelling them with loving care on
those they saw at play beneath their own eyes, and
testing them to see that they performed their functions
perfectly. What delicate artistic energy they spent
upon the upper tissues of the body, upon the brain and
ear and eye! Each created and developed the quality
loved and admired in the other. There was nothing
they omitted to make the new being complete and
happy in all his functions. On the minute nerves
and tissues they worked under powerful microscopes,
and the minutiae of every sense and organ and function
were examined and tested again and again with the
same magnifying power turned on them. The figure
they made most noble and symmetrical in proportions
and outlines, the face they made as beautiful as human

424 Limanora

face could look. The stuff in which they worked was
ethereal in its texture and constituents. It was difficult
to discern it with our senses even under the great mag-
nifying globe. It seemed to be of air or some product
of the ether; for it flowed underneath their guiding
fingers almost invisible. And the result was a body
more transparent than their own. It was a marvel of
refinement and strength combined; they experimented,
on every limb and sense, every nerve and muscle and
tissue, and they corrected every defect in it before they
reached the final act.

At last the work was completed to their satisfaction,
and they braced themselves for the most exhausting
task of all. How were they to make of this image a
living creature ? I smiled as I thought of the impossi-
bility of what was evidently before them. Yet they
seemed perfectly calm in their preparation for the final
endeavour. Only there was a subdued volcanic energy
in their systems that seemed to show that they con-
sidered it a task almost superhuman. They encouraged
each other, and we could see them infuse new magnet-
ism into their bodies by means of machinery of great
power. Their faces were filled with the glow of a rap-
turous appeal .to heaven. They were putting them-
selves into connection with some being they adored
invisible to us, some impalpable fountain of life. They
took the hands of the image they had formed, and
raised it; they placed it between them, so that it should
be in the path of all energy that passed from one to the
other. They laid their hands upon its head and nerve-
centres, and at the same time the pleading rapture on
their faces rose almost to trance. Their spirits seemed
to go out from them. They looked like two in dream.
A faint flush came upon the cheeks of the image be-

Inspiration 425

tween them, and died out. Again their souls seemed
to return to full consciousness, and the rapture grew
upon their faces. Again the signal of life dawned on
the countenance of the image. Throb by throb they
gave of their own souls to his, meantime drawing from
some fountain of life and spirit unseen by us. Slowly
the eyelids rose, and the lips moved. There was true
life in the image. The three walked as in trance, yet
with the joy of creation pulsing through them. The
child of their imagination was like both, yet inde-
pendent, and more beautiful to look upon. Love broke
through the new being and theirs in wild pulsations.
The three awoke to a new life. And then the scene
vanished, and I seemed to have but dreamed.

Yet there was the deep valley with the sunset rays
shooting through it ; and up the slopes rested thou-
sands of flesh-and-blood Limanoraus beside me. A few
thoughts, and I knew that it was no dream. Was it
magic ? I could not believe that such a people would
indulge in mere trifling with life and the powers above
life. My spirit of enquiry stirred my guardians, and I
soon knew from them that this was the first publication
of a new book, called Human Sculpture. The deep
valley with its apparatus was the theatre of futurition,
where every imaginative foresight was first put into
a form that would appeal to the whole people. It was
called Loomiefa or the display of pioneering.

Their literature was all science, and that the science
of the future. Romancing about the past or the present
seemed to this utilitarian people waste of the noblest
faculty of man, shameful squandering of imaginative
wealth on that which is naught. Mere retrospection
for its own sake without reference to subsequent ad-
vance was thought by them the most pernicious of

426 Limanora

madnesses; they diagnosed it as a kind of ethical blind-
ness, that could neither see the right nor do it. The
state of peoples who looked at nothing but the past
with admiration was one of the lowest circles of their
inferno; another was that of nations that saw nothing
good outside of themselves and their immediate sur-
roundings. In such unprogressive national or racial
attitudes they saw all the evils of inbreeding; the
weaknesses and intellectual and moral diseases of the
past grew despotic in their power over the human sys-
tem, till they came to seem the only virtues; even what
had been once virtues grew inveterate and routine, or
monstrous and overpowering in their excess. The
past served only as the soil for the better growths of
the future. And an exhausted soil became barren, if
not poisonous, for all but weeds, or growths that
needed and deserved no attention or cultivation.

To spend imagination on the past, therefore, was to
them a crime against the future. What was dead and
needed invention to bring before the mind again was
better in its grave. A literature that turned back to
the past for its progress clogged the wheels of progress,
unless it belonged to a race that had fallen back cent-
uries behind the natural advance of the world. For a
progressive nation to give of its best for the resurrec-
tion of a dead past was to confess a strain of barbarism
in it, and to prophesy its own rapid decay. The im-
agination was the faculty of the future; it had its eyes
set in front, and not behind like memory; it was meant
to investigate the horizon before us, and to interpret
the lights and shadows thrown from below the rim of
vision, and not to look back, whether with regret or
adoration, over the region that humanity had beaten
hard with its weary footing. The future is infinite;

Inspiration 427

the human past covers but a few centuries, and a nar-
row track through them. It is not for want of scope
that the faculty of futurition is driven back on the
ground already trodden; it is through a grievous and
incurable malady, the malady of preterpluperfection,
that twists the face round to the back of the neck, and
rots or petrifies the tissues of the brain and the heart.
They counted it the saddest of all spectacles on earth
to see a race, that by its nature could be rapidly pro-
gressive, waste its highest energies in retracing again
and again the footsteps of its own ancestry or of the
ancestry of some other race. Nothing would persuade
them to permit any study of the past that was not
meant to be wholly relevant to the future. They
tended to be, I thought, almost negligent of the value
of history and historical study; for, as our Western
commonplace goes, history repeats itself; and however
new and ameliorative an age may be, it may obtain
lessons, and still more warnings, from ages past.

Their literature was all of the future. There were
two of the largest families of the race devoted to it, and
their numbers were ever being recruited by adoption
into them of scions of others, who revealed exceptional
imaginative faculty. They had the generalised train-
ing of the island; but their particular training was
more completely specialised than that of any other
family. Nothing was omitted that would tend to make
them of imagination all compact, or to give them such
ease in their command of language as would bring
them the exact word without effort. Next to these
points in their education stood tutelage in all that per-
tained to scenic art and music. For they had to give
their ideas a staging that would at once appeal to the
imagination of the whole people. Loomiefa was in

428 Limanora

their province. And the literary form into which they
were to put their communications as to the future had
to be as perfect as it could be in their language, exactly
expressing all they had to convey, and at the same
time appealing to the ear by its melody and harmony.
As far as histrionic art was allowable in the island they
were the artists, whilst in the linguistic conventions of
the people they were the leaders and suggesters in the
making of words, and in the choice of words made.
They had, I could see, the finest heads in the com-
munity; the brow was broad, full, and shapely; the
eyes were large and yet deeply set under the brows;
the base of the skull was of great width; every section
of the brain that had to do with imaginative and poetic
power was well developed. Yet their faces and features
showed no difference from the common Limanoran
type; they had no more beauty or regularity of outline.
It was clear that all children of a certain shape of skull
and development of brain were selected for training
and adoption by these two families, whenever they
needed recruits.

From the first the youth of these two families were
educated in the sciences of the day in order that they
might know what gaps in knowledge had to be filled,
and what laws should guide and limit their imaginative
prospecting. For the literature they produce is science
in embryo. Science lays the foundations of literature,
and literature prepares the way for science. These
families by their imaginative productions based on all
that is already known pioneer the scientific investi-
gators into the new regions of the future. They keep
in touch with the leaders of science, and act as allies to
them, finding out the track of what these are trying to
discover or invent, and suggesting methods of supply-

Inspiration 429

ing their wants or reaching their aims. They provide
working hypotheses for the scientists to apply and test
and they map out roads for the whole race into the
darkness of the unknown or the twilight of the half-
conjectured.

Thus their literature is fiction; for tentative fiction,
they hold, is the only unstagnant truth. The produc-
tions of the pioneering families have all to be submitted
to the national test. What the race disapproves of is
promptly cancelled and forgotten. What meets with
the approval of the elders or of the leaders of any one
of the sciences is handed over to them for experimenta-
tion, even though it should not attract the rest of the
people. What strikes the fancy of the nation as a
whole is adopted as the map and guide of the future;
it is the sacred book of the time, and the citizens study
it daily for the purpose of reaching the goal it sets be-
fore their life.

But every new age antiquates one or more of these
sacred books. For the region they have mapped out
in the future is reached and travelled over, the advance
they anticipate is made, the ideal they paint is realised
and rapidly becoming commonplace. It puzzled me
for a time to guess what they did with their superseded
books, knowing as I did how superfluous they counted
all researches into the past and all imaginative pictures
of the present. My question as usual was not long
unanswered. I was shown the library of antiquated
fiction in the valley of memories. It was used in the
very earliest stages of education. The children read
the books or heard them in order to see, when they
reached years of maturity, what the race had come
from and how much it might yet advance, to gather
enthusiasm from the spectacle of the progress made,

430 Limanora

and to learn lessons for their own future. Beyond
childhood and early youth every minute was counted
lost that was not spent on the future and its possibili-
ties; and for a man or woman of mature years all forms
of antiquarianisin were counted idleness.

They never permitted themselves to lay too much
stress on any sacred book, or to adore it too passion-
ately, however much they might be guided by it for a
time; for they knew from experience that it would soon
be worked into the nature of the race and the system
of the individual, and another would take its place.
The sacred book of to-day was bound to be transcended
to-morrow. The foresights and ideals of this year would
be the truisms of next. The real desecration, they
thought, was to rest too many ages over a sacred book,
its precepts un worked into the life, its pictures and
ideals unrealised; to adore its words and deny its spirit
by failing to advance beyond its point of view. A book
too long held sacred is a charge of stagnancy and bar-
barism against a race and an insult to its intelligence.
It proves that the civilisation has become stereotyped,
or worse, retrospective ; to eat, to sleep, to fall prostrate
before a dead ideal, to propagate and die, sum up the
ultimate duties of existence at its highest level.

Every book was sacred to the Linianorans which
threw light upon the track ahead into the darkness;
and so long as it still gave light where light was
needed, it remained sacred. Whenever its light be-
came the common daylight around the race, and espe-
cially if they had to look backwards in order to see its
wayrnarks, then was it promptly committed to the val-
ley of memories. Not a moment was wasted on its pre-
cepts after they had become the laws of everyday
existence. They had known from their own history

Inspiration 43 l

what a terrible engine of oppression a book might be
when once it had become antiquated without losing the
adoration of the people; its prophecies, which had be-
come mere tales of the past, had to be projected again
into the future by mystic interpretation; its precepts,
embodying the spirit of a generation long dead, had to
be galvanised into life by casuistry; and innumerable
methods had to be extorted from its overstrained text
to prevent the human mind moving on past its own
stage of morality and civilisation. How many ages in
their own history did their ancestors live with their
dead! Into the warmest feelings of their hearts had
the grave-clothes of the past intertwined; and what
torture to love and the noblest feelings, what bloodshed
and horrors it cost them to be able to stand off from
their dead authority, and look at it with unprejudiced
mind! It had become a part of their best selves, and
it seemed like suicide to cast it from them, and relegate
it to its true home, the graveyard of the past.

That long experience was burned into their natures;
and to lay too much stress on any new book or idea
gave them an instinctive pang. They could not bear
to linger over it, once the light had died out of it and
its leading had become a highway-mark for the passer-
by. To utter or admire the obvious or commonplace
was counted one of the gravest offences against the
commonweal; it awakened a look of pity in the eyes of
the listener as for one who was smitten with an incura-
ble disease. A repetition of the offence would lead to
drastic measures with the victim. He was haled before
the medicists, and his system was minutely examined
for the source of the malady, and for weeks was he
kept under medical supervision ; no labour or watch-
ing or remedial pain was spared till the source of

432 Limanora

offending was scourged out of the constitution of the
sufferer.

As a rule it was found on investigation that the in-
fection had come from some book, whose spirit and
precepts had become incorporated in the past of the
race and could give no more vitality to it. It was
good enough for children and youth, who were passing
through the primitive stages of development; to them
it was fresh and new for a time, and was even the
source of life and vigour. But once out of the valley
of memories the men and women who could read it
with any pleasure were considered unhealthy and ata-
vistic, and were sent to hospital for treatment. The
symptoms of the malady of the commonplace were well
known and most patent, — loquacity, fondness for con-
fidential communications and mysterious suggestions
under solemn conditionings, or even oaths of silence,
bustling idleness, feeble smiles of impotent superiority,
jocular dogmatism, assumption of wisdom, and exces-
sive vanity. If the disease had not been so infectious
and stealthy in its spread, it would never have been
treated so seriously and so promptly; for it was seldom
malignant, in its earlier appearances at least; only
when it became morbid, and took the shape of injured
feeling at unrecognised genius, resulting at times in
jealousy and slander, or conspiracy and rebellion, or
when it grew masterful and acquired a sense of its own
infallibility and omnipotence, resulting generally in
petty spite and persecution, was there any deadly virus
in it. It was its epidemic character that made it most
formidable, and necessitated a system of moral quaran-
tine. vSpecial precautions were taken in permitting the
use of the sacred books of the past, and of antiquated
or superseded ideas. They were only useful for teach-

Inspiration 433

ing the young reverence for great thoughts and great
thinkers, and for leading the mature to estimate their
own achievements modestly, when they saw the rapid
antiquation of even the most striking books.

One evil that arose from the study of past literature,
the over-valuation of literary work, they tried to ob-
viate. They placed noble deeds on the same footing
with noble words and thoughts, and saw that they were
as carefully recorded and described. It was the duty
of the young to report, and give permanent form to,
anything that was done greatly. With their enthusi-
asm made more glowing by their ignorance and in-
experience, they acted as the historiographers of the
race. The youth of a family went with the elders
whenever any difficulty offered itself, and with their
recording instruments, inasans and linasans and idro-
sans, they took flying pictures, electrographs, and re-
ports of the scene for deposit in the valley of memories.
If any emergency arose and was nobly met when the
youthful remembrancers were not present, they wrote
the annals of it none the less, and reproduced its scenes
in moving representations after interviewing all who
witnessed the deed. There was as much inspiration,
this people held, in a great action as in a great book,
provided it illumined the darkness of the road ahead
of them.

For to them the true test of greatness and inspiration
was the power of fore-illumination or of stimulus to
progress. Whatsoever flashed light over the unknown
in front must have come from a higher point of view
than their own immediate surroundings. Word or
deed, it was to them all the same, if it had this divine
characteristic; the one was as worthy of chronicling

and preserving as the other. But they ceased to look

28

434 Limanora

upon it as a source of stimulus to action as soon as it
failed to throw light upon their future, or to hold up
an ideal that they had not yet attained. Inspiration,
like all other things and beings in the universe, was
progressive. No idea or deed, no word or book could
be permanently inspired. And the quicker a race pro-
gressed, the sooner it sterilised its sacred thoughts and
deeds. All noble human advance was a process of de-
inspiration; a step upwards makes the climber capable
of looking down upon the previous point of vision, and
of looking up for a still higher, and to gaze downwards
is to encourage retrogression. Whosoever or whatso-
ever caught the first gleam of a peak above them was
to them inspired. But it was the duty to reach that
peak in their march upwards as soon as possible; and
once it was reached, where was the inspiration ? It
was itself far below with the age that supplied it.

Some new deed or thought or book was certain to
take the place of that which had for a time been con-
sidered sacred. And, if that did not come, then woe
to the race! Progress must stop and darkness must
close in on their purblind leaders, who, in order to re-
tain their dominance, must elevate the past, immediate
or distant, into a divinity, and its best book into an
oracle. After a time so obscured do the pages of this
book become with cobwebs of interpretation that at last
they must spin new cobwebs out of their intestines.
The dread of light from without becomes a horror. If
a new teacher or prophet should come, down with him
into the dust; his teachings are false, for they agree
not with the devotion-cobwebbed book. If a reformer
sees light above and ahead, he is banned as a messenger
of hell; and what he sees is nothing but a diabolic
marshlight. All through the race spread the awful

Inspiration

435

diseases of spiritual inbreeding, inability to distinguish
the true from the false, love of delusion, unwholesome
and insane pursuits and ends, and the madness of
cruelty and intolerance. Nothing but fierce revolution
could save a race from such a plight. And the germs
of revolution must come from without themselves and
without the world.

CHAPTER VII

PIONEERING

I IMAGINATION, corrected by racial instinct in the
I assemblies of all, was the seeker for foregleams of
what was to be. And a people that had organised its
civilisation into a disciplined advance was not likely to
leave its scouts and vanguard unorganised. Its destiny
was largely in the hands of those who went before it
into the night, or who ascended the heights above it,
and told of the region to be traversed next, and the
best routes through it. There was no service that
needed so much the best powers of the race and its best
organisation.

Into the pioneering families were gathered their most
powerful imaginations. For imagination is the only
clairvoyant of the faculties; it can see what lies below
the horizon of knowledge; it can forecast the world as
it might be and as it is to be; and it can draw the hu-
man mind onwards by the splendours of this forecast.
This people had early realised the sibylline character
of the faculty, and the great part it might play in their
devotion to progress. And they resolved to save it
from all waste. They refused to have it become the
mere slave of luxury or of popular amusement, such
as they saw it was in most other civilised nations.

436

Pioneering 437

Even where it conjured up the past in magnificent
literary pictures, what else was it than the pander to
tastes and habits that were overworn, the encomiast of
deeds that had better be buried in oblivion ? It fre-
quented the palaces of kings and licked the dust off
their feet, or it played the buffoon to the indolent, sen-
suous crowd. At rare times it isolated itself, and,
heedless of the babbling world that offered it so many
prizes, it wrestled with the powers of darkness and
ignorance. But what could a poor recluse do against
the infinite night? If it were to help the forward
march of humanity, it must be disciplined and or-
ganised to a definite aim.

All other peoples have left imagination to struggle
for itself. This people recognised it as the most un-
schooled and shiftless of the human faculties, whilst
they felt it to be the most divine and fullest of promise.
They determined that amongst them it should lose its
reeling gait and wandering, aimless eye, and become
the pioneer of their march onwards; instead of fixing
its eye on the past or on the favours of the great, it
should skirmish before* the main army into the region
of the unknown ; it should report on the difficulties and
the enemies to be met, and map out the world as it was
to be. What would be thought of the shipmaster who
let the keenest-eyed of his crew lounge round the ship
looking into the pockets of his comrades and making
them laugh, or lean over the stern watching the track
left behind, if darkness and cloud and a broken sea
ever lay on the horizon ahead ? What else were the
nations doing with their lookout faculty, imagination,
but allowing it to waste itself on providing amusement
for the luxurious, or on figuring the problem of the past ?

It was one of the first duties of the Limanoran elders,

Limanora

after the great series of purgations of the race, to or-
ganise and develop the imagination they had in their
midst. They had observed that there were two great
types and uses of the faculty; one was short of vision,
and could see with great distinctness the regions that
were hidden in twilight immediately in front of them;
the other was far-sighted, and could descry the fea-
tures of wide regions that lay in darkness under the
horizon. There happened to be amongst them two
families distinguished from all others by their great
imaginativeness, and from each other by pre-eminence
in one of these two kinds of imagination. The task
therefore was easy. It only needed care in disciplin-
ing the members of these to the main purpose of the
race, in developing the faculty of each, and in recruit-
ing their numbers from the most imaginative children
of other families. The L,oomiamo or pioneers of the
immediate were recruited chiefly from the scientific and
technical families; for their duties lay most of all in
supplying hypotheses for experimentation, in suggest-
ing methods of solving difficult problems, and in tracing
out paths that invention should take; invention in fact
was what they were oftenest engaged in. But there
was a subordinate function, that was, however, of equal
importance for the forward movements of the race; it
was to take the far-reaching conceptions of the other
imaginative family, and show how they could be at-
tained by the civilisation and means they already had.
They accepted the scientific ideas and apparatus of the
time as they were and out of them and their develop-
ment they engineered a highway through the inter-
vening twilight to the ideal that the Fraloomiamo or
pioneers of the distant had pictured and set up ahead
of the race.

Pioneering 439

I had not known of this division of pioneering work
when I flew back from the marvellous spectacle in the
valley of futuritions. As I thought over it, I became
more and more sceptical of the realisability of the
scene. It had the inconsecution and absurdity of a
dream. I said to Thyriel, where was the possibility of
ever substituting artificial for natural propagation of
the race ? It was completely out of the line of evolu-
tion, and could lead to nothing but what was unnatural
and evil. They could modify nature to an indefinite
extent, I knew; but what was the use of attempting to
supersede nature ? And suppose it were possible to
supersede it in this respect, where would be the advan-
tage? They could already modify and guide nature
so as to produce the type of children they desired for
the progress of the race ; what more was needed ?

Thyriel gave no answer, partly because she thought
that the elders were more capable of answering, partly
because she knew that the publication of the book on
human sculpture was by no means finished. Next day
my sense of community with the immediate yearning
and aim of the Limanorans drew me unconsciously to
lyoomiefa again; and on my way the streaming wings
through the sky showed me that my impulse was not
purposeless; there was a general movement towards
the same goal. Soon the whole amphitheatre was filled
from height to hollow with spectators enriched in colour
by the rays of the afternoon sun.

I had scarcely settled in my rest and surveyed the
scene when I knew that all eyes were fixed on the hol-
low of the valley. The platform had again run out
with the globular magnifier covering it. But the suc-
cession of scenes upon it was almost too swift for my
observation, untrained as I still was in my senses, and

44° Limanora

a certain confusion still rests over the spectacle in my
memory. Many of the links in the chain were so
amazing as to bewilder me, and yet the general pur-
pose and effect of the scene as a whole rise above the
confusion in my mind.

I knew before it was done that it was a complete
answer to my questions and scepticism. The Loomiamo
were enacting the various stages in the evolution of the
race which would connect its actual state with the
possibility of artificial human propagation. One scene
enacted what they had long been able to do, the pro-
duction of animal tissue of all kinds; even the most
subtle nerve was spun, and under their microscopes
they could examine it like a rope. Another showed
animal creation at work on the combination of tissue
into one of the lower types of animal. One after an-
other in a long series we the saw creative power rise
in its ambitions and efforts through the animal creation
up to the human. But the most striking scene was to
come. It was the application of the newly discovered
biometer to the search for the principle of life. We
saw the creative artists investigate with the instrument
plant after plant and animal after animal, and fail in
their attempts to isolate it or produce it. They modi-
fied the biometer in innumerable ways. Then we saw
them fly though the atmosphere, and set the new life-
measuring apparatus afloat in space. After repeated
attempts, ever pulling the faleena back empty, they at
last showed by the joy on their faces that they had at-
tained the goal of their quest. In the delicate test-
tubes of their new biometers was found something that
kept agitating their indicators. Soon they had it in
their laboratories, and were experimenting with it.
Again and again they gathered it from the vacuum

Pioneering 441

above the atmosphere. At last by means of it they
were enabled to find it in the plants around them, and
in the animals of the surrounding islands. A series
of scenes as amazing showed how they came at the
discovery of the principle of soul by means of the psy-
chometer. Step by step (and each step, I came after-
wards to feel, represented a Limanoran generation)
they traced it back to its secret. Most of all were they
aided in their researches by investigations outside of
the atmosphere; there they captured in the tubes of
their psychometers the form of energy that constituted
human soul. And in their laboratories they were able
to study it at leisure.

For long I felt that these pictures of the future were
unlikely to be realised. Yet the steps in the process
were so gradual, and the scene representing each so
vivid that I came in after years to accept it as well
within the range of Limanoran possibilities; for I real-
ised at last how far into the future imagination could
pioneer, and what a vast number of ages one of these
predictive dramas would cover. My sense of time was
crude and weak during my earlier years in the island,
and it was difficult for me to appreciate the passage of
cosmic periods, such as were often implied in the scenes
representing the publication of a book by the Fraloo-
miamo.

I afterwards listened to the book of Human Sculpture
itself, as it uttered itself from a loud- sounding linasan
or reproducer of speech. This automaton-reader had
the long strip of irelium constituting a Limanoran book
fed into it off the cylinder on which the book was kept
rolled. It gave the sound and every intonation of the
author's voice, so that there was no difficulty in follow-
ing his every thought as it found expression. I never

442 Limanora

came to be able to read those books on the irelium rolls
themselves under a microscope, as the Limanorans
could, and preferred to use my hearing instead of my
eyes. There was no possibility of ambiguity if I lis-
tened to the words as they came hot from the thinker's
own lips.

A new and more esoteric kind of book tended to
supersede this at a later period. It consisted of an
electrogram of the author's thoughts, as they developed
and shaped themselves, flashed on to long moving strips
of labramor or electricity-sponge by his active magnetic
sense; this placed in an idrosan or electrograph affected
the firla of the receiver so that he followed the whole
process of thinking. Such a permanent record of crea-
tive thought in its process of creating was of measure-
less value to such a people as this, for every economy
of time and intelligence meant a quickening of their
march into the nobler future. But for many ages the
effort of electrographing the thought was too much ex-
cept for the most powerful of mature creative minds;
and that of receiving the flash of the electrogram
through the firla was within the capacity of none but
those who had developed their magnetic faculty to
great refinement of power.

The book of Human Sculpture was the first of the re-
cent imaginative productions that I became acquainted
with. Thyriel and I joined a party of youth who,
under the guidance of our proparents, were to listen to
it, as it sounded through the liiiasan in the valley of
Ivoomiefa. Hour after hour we followed the melodious
periods, as they echoed up the slopes; at brief in-
tervals on the rocky curtain at the head of the gorge
there would flame out for several minutes a moving
picture of the scenes we had witnessed the enaction of

Pioneering 443

on the stage; and a still more striking illustration of
the text of the book was a magnetic communication to
our minds of the originating impulse which moulded
each thought and scene in the imagination of the
author, and the creative enthusiasm he felt as each
idea burst in all its light upon his soul. By the time
we had finished the book we knew its whole conception
and history, its purpose, and its probable effect upon
the civilisation.

It answered all my questions, and rooted out all my
scepticism. The whole object of their unending labours
was to take command of nature by finding out her se-
crets and abridging her processes, so as to make them
serviceable to their advance. I felt how absurd had
been my objections; for where would this people have
been, if they had left nature to herself? What else
was barbarism but leaving nature to herself, so that the
more cruel animal part of her became dominant ? Na-
ture included an infinite range of gradations of energy
and life from what we call dead matter to the subtle
and elevated organisations that fill space and evade the
finest perception of our senses. Within our own sys-
tems are to be found many of those, from the debris of
our bodily tissues and organs to the noblest thought
we can conceive; the precept to let nature alone is
fraught with inextricable ambiguity; and if we let the
myriad natures within us fight it out, it is not difficult
to see which would have dominance, for it is easier to
level down than to level up. Every interference with
the lower nature in order to bring it under the sway of
the higher, every new mastery of our systems as a
whole by our creative thought, is a step upwards in the
scale of existences. Three fourths of the process of
human propagation belonged to the sphere of our lower

444 Limanora

nature, so that civilised men and women were ashamed
to speak of it, and tended to become gross and coarse
if they did freely speak of it. Every act seemed to
drag them back again to the level of the animals, and
it took them years of effort to drive the thoughts and
traces of it into oblivion. They had as a people pain-
fully fought their way up out of the slough of passion,
and mastered the emotions that tended to overbalance
them by their excess, and to plunge them back again
into it. Guard themselves as they might by all kinds
of precautions, and spiritualise the act as they ever
tried to do, its necessary recurrence never failed to em-
brute the nature for a moment, whilst it still kept open
a path for retrogression. To shut out this possibility
of re-descent into the beast would be one of the greatest
services to their race.

As useful for their advance would the command
of human propagation be in another direction. The
only fear of deterioration that still haunted them arose
from atavism. Nature had still a trick of returning on
her own footsteps. The child of the noblest pair had
at times traces of far-back ancestry resurgent in evil or
retrogressive traits; and it wasted the time and the
best energy of parents and proparents to obliterate
these. In every germ lay dormant the potentialities
of its whole ancestral past; and any one of them might
assert itself as master during the dim unguided life of
gestation. With all their precautions something evil
might still lurk in the systems of the young to be de-
veloped in full maturity of life. But if they moulded
every tissue and organ and faculty for themselves, this
retrogressive tendency that nature treasures up in
every germ and child would disappear. There would
be nothing to watch or obliterate in the immature.

Pioneering 445

A still greater economy of time and labour would
result in the abridgment of the earlier processes of
education. Education, it is true, never ceased through-
out life. But the education of the mature was self-
conducted; the citizen was his own schoolmaster, and
his surroundings were his instruments and assistants.
That of the earlier stages used up the labour and wis-
dom of two other personalities for the long period of
discipline; they were ever on watch and guard lest the
past that lay in the youthful nature should suddenly
rise and master it. For all education is a wrestle with
the superseded past, which becomes evil as soon as it
grows superfluous or obstructs further advance. Every
form of vitality that has played its part on the stage of
existence leaves it with reluctance; it clings to the new,
that it may have a little more of life, and impedes its
advance. The obsolete most survives in the tissues of
the young and immature; and to educate is to strug-
gle with the obsolete or obsolescent. The labour and
thought needed to make the struggle end in the suc-
cess of the new and progressive have never been under-
stood so well by any as by the elders of the L,imanorans.
No effort of their civilisation was so exhausting as the
educative. To enter on parenthood or proparenthood
made them pause, for all acknowledged that the as-
sumption of this duty was the greatest sacrifice a man
or woman could make for the progress of the race.
They knew that for half a century their individual
vigilance could never cease, and that the strain would
come on all their faculties, and not on one or two
alone, as it would in most of the other duties they owed
to the race, even invention or discovery. Whatsoever
would commute or abolish this heavy service to the
nation was sure to be welcomed. So vast an amount

446 Limanora

of the best time and wisest ability of the island would
be set free that it would be difficult to calculate the
acceleration of progress it would effect.

All this and a thousand other considerations passed
through my mind, as I listened to the book of Hu-
man Sculpture and drank in its inspirations. The
doubts that its dramatic publication had left in me were
all laid. I now knew that this would be a new sacred
book, which would hold up for ages an ideal for Lima-
nora to struggle towards.

This book of Human Sculpture made clear to me the
meaning and purpose of another publication that I soon
witnessed. It was the book of Asexuality, which
showed us dramatically how sex and its results be-
longed to a lower and more physical stage of personal
development. It revealed to us the nature of the be-
ings that flit through sidereal space just outside the
ken of our senses, centres of energy less inert and more
ethereal than any terrestrial creatures. Into them
flows more freely than it flows into us the divine energy
that is above all. Out of themselves they give as freely
to their fellows as they receive. They need no such
inequality and unstable equilibrium as sex to teach
them such bounteous benignity. Living in the pre-
cincts of the fountain of life as they do, not imprisoned
within local and temporal limits, but free to move
whither they will and to drink unstintingly of supernal
existence, they know how essentially all nobler life
consists in free bounty; the more of themselves and
their energy they give, the higher the energy they re-
ceive in its place. Sex is only the rude beginning of
this higher law, the principle of antagonism to stag-
nation, of giving lavishly in order to have room for

Pioneering 447

receiving from higher sources. It supersedes and
antagonises the law of parasitism, which governs the
crude beginnings of life on a new world. The lower
microscopic creatures that live a famished jejune life
in space ready to pounce upon any orb their shoals en-
counter, propagate by mere self-division; they have
nothing to give. A new star cooling down on its sur-
face sufficiently for life to settle on is their great op-
portunity. There they may parasite and feed to their
heart's content, propagating by the myriad every in-
finitesimal fraction of time. And, as long as they live
in such primeval luxury, they never move one step
higher in life. Over-supply of food, indeed all luxury,
damns a being to stagnancy. The full-fed parasite is
unprogressive, and, though multiplying teemingly, is
practically sterile; his generations are on a level with
himself ; he is immortal by mere fission ; the only func-
tion of his life is to grab, till his gettings make him too
big for his microscopic unity, and he has to break up.
In the higher stages of life, even in human life, this
infecundity attaches in the same way to luxurious liv-
ing, whilst the sycophant is sterile of purpose and ex-
istence. All take and no give is a monstrosity above
the lowest bacterial life. The more of dependence or
flattery there is in a people, the lower their natures; a
tyranny is the lowest political organism; and of tyran-
nies the worst is the socialistic; for there, there is no
inequality to antagonise and overcome the lethargy of
parasitism.

Even when bacteria begin to feel the pinch of scanty
nutrition or malnutrition, they start on a new career,
and show the first traces of an advance in life. They
incline to give as well as receive, and here are the
primeval beginnings of sex. Ill- fed bacteria tend to

448 Limanora

propagate by means of special cells or spores. Instead
of steeping themselves in food till they burst, they now
begin to nurse within their systems a germ, to which
they give of their best till it is able to launch out for
itself; they cease to reproduce by fission, and reproduce
by spore-formation. This is the first step upwards on
the long road to human morality. The beginnings of
sex are the beginnings of unlikeness of individuals, and
the beginnings of unstable equilibrium and of overflow
of energy from one being into another. This is the
organisation of the policy of give in a new star, ultim-
ately meant to drive out, after a world-long struggle,
the antagonistic policy of mere get. Sex first intro-
duced into our world the eagerness of one being to give
of its best for the good of another being. Conjugal
love in the human era is the first noble form of sexual-
ky; and parental love is its still nobler offshoot.

The development of parenthood is the knell of sex-
uality. For it is a new and higher phase of the policy
of give, and anliquates the mere mutuality of sexual
love. It gives of its all expecting nought in return.
And into the place of the energy that has gone out of
it flows an energy that is nearer the divine and raises
towards the divine. It is at this point that sex be-
comes a lower stage, seeming almost to mingle with
brute life. Out of it must humanity struggle in order
to progress. " In the spirit there is no sex." This I
had heard as a meaningless echo from wise lips in the
West. Now I saw its significance. The higher, the
more spiritual we become, the less we permit sex to
dominate, and the less difference there is between the
sexes. It was in the world of imagination and intel-
lect that the first idea of equality of the sexes arose.
And the more intellectual a people became, the less it

Pioneering 449

insisted on the difference between man and woman.
Emphasis on sex in a civilised people was a sure sign
of approaching decay.

For the goal towards which the human race is ad-
vancing is asexual; not that that will be the main
characteristic; but it is the most striking compared
with our present phase of being. The more highly
organised existences that fill space and hover just out-
side the range of our grosser senses have reached the
stage in which the stimulus of sex or even of parent-
hood is no longer needed in order to save the benignant
instincts from dying out. And the higher a centre of
energy climbs in the scale of existence, the more eager
does it become to overflow into other centres, to give
of its highest and best. What we call life, or the spon-
taneous rejection of stagnancy, begins on its lowest
fringe with a tendency to take all and give none, with
appetite. Below this are inert centres of energy, that
resist all receiving as well as all giving, that exist only
in persisting, in keeping what they have and what they
are; this stage is usually called dead matter in contrast
to energy, although it consists of nuclei of energy as
truly as any living creature. Between the two stages
of mere keep and mere take seems to lie a great gulf
fixed; but there are minute evidences of transition to
be found all through nature. We ourselves, the hu-
man race, form the transition from the stage of take all
to the stage of give all. And sex is the chief impetus
to progress in the earlier history of human evolution.
Parenthood takes its place in the upper levels, where
the human is rapidly approaching the supersensuous.
The very fact of our nature being so heterogeneous and
complex reveals that we are making for something
higher; and, as our appetites imply a stage behind us,

45° Limanora

in which our systems were fitted for nothing but tak-
ing, so our loves, our benevolences, our self-sacrifices,
point forward to a stage in which the whole of exist-
ence will consist in giving. I remember, whenever an
average man in Europe quoted the phrase, " It is more
blessed to give than to receive," he meant it as a jest,
or in a sinister sense; even the priest, when he had to
preach the doctrine as one of the foundations of his re-
ligion, had incredulity in his heart if not in the smile
on his lips, as he spoke the words. Amongst the
Limanorans it was a truism that was implied in all
conduct and need never be explicitly stated. And the
book of Asexuality revealed the inner and scientific
significance to me. The highest state of any centre of
energy in the cosmos was to be eagerly, lavishly, and
perpetually giving out of its best. For thus was it ever
kept in unstable equilibrium, towards which flowed
higher and higher energies from centres above it; thus
it kept its life unstagnant and immortal. That which
only received, and was eager only to receive, suffered
the maladies of the luxurious, soon reached its utmost
capacity, and fell into stagnancy and decay. Above
the human rose the hierarchy of sexless, supersensuous
beings, who peopled infinite space; but into their ranks
rose the human by means of struggle, by means of the
effluence of their energy into others, by means of sex,
and still more of parenthood. The purpose of sex is to
attain to the higher asexuality.

Not that monasticism is good for the human race.
It is on the contrary the greatest of evils in the sexual
stage of progress. It counts as wicked and harmful
that which alone prevents self-absorption and the be-
ginning of decay and death. Sex is the provision of
nature for drawing the animal outside of itself so that

Pioneering 451

it may introduce into its generations the seeds of de-
velopment. It makes it as a centre of energy feel the
need of other centres, to which it may give, from which
it may receive. It is her chief means of keeping any
vital centre from falling back into stagnancy and the
desire of stagnancy. And, as long as man is still ani-
mal, sex and its resultant parenthood must continue to
play the main part in development. To attempt to
reach asexuality before the animal is ejected from his
system is to balk progress and invite stagnancy and
decay.

The book of Asexuality showed how the family must
remain the unit and lever of advance till sex should be
superseded by individual creation. Then friendship or
the bond of contrast in community will take the place
of the bond of heredity, or of that bond which is based
upon sexual passion. The mutual choice will be com-
pletely rational and in the will of the choosers. There
will be nothing instinctive or mediate or unconscious
about it. It is indeed one of the indignities of this
present sexual stage of evolution that we are thrust on
in spite of ourselves, that we have little command over
the stimulus that is urging us on the road of progress.

The Limanorans had got rid of some of this indignity
inasmuch as the elders and wise men took command of
the instinct of sex, and bent it in the direction of their
own line of advance. In other peoples, and especially
in the West, it stumbled blindly on, led sometimes by
the love of youthful beauty, sometimes by the love
of money, sometimes by the necessities of position
and diplomacy, most frequently by ambition and the
love of power or social influence, seldom or never by
the deliberate intent of producing noble posterity.
As a consequence retrogression in health, physique,

45 2 Limanora

morality, or intellectual power was seen in all ranks far
oftener than progress. Over the whole there might be
a slight advance in centuries; but in most families it
was one generation forward and the next back. This
people had by their purgations become the assistants of
nature; and since the era of the exilings they had
wisely piloted sex to serve the highest purposes of evo-
lution. The young were still driven half-blindly by
the sting of sex, and might by chance accelerate pro-
gress; but the elders without revealing their art wisely
controlled the instinct, and by the governance of prox-
imity and opportunity, companionship and circum-
stances, amongst the immature made it the guardian
and keeper of past advance and the prompter of still
renewed advance. The final step was pictured by this
new imaginative book, the supersession of sex and the
deliberate creation of posterity. This would relieve
the elders of their anxious task of match-making, and
put into the hands of the pairs themselves the control
of the parental instinct and the power of improving
their posterity.

Even as it was, I could see, from the axioms and
postulates of this book of Asexuality, and the impres-
sion it made on my friends and companions, that the
sex-instinct was already to a large extent under the
control of those whom it impelled. It had become,
like their appetite for food, saturated with intellect and
deliberation. It was no mere goad that drove them
on in the dark stumbling towards some object that
would gratify the passion. They knew its physio-
logical and psychological working, and understood
how the destinies of the race waited upon the wisdom
or folly of its guidance. Not even the youngest of
them would allow it the caprice and perverse whimsi-

Pioneering 453

cality that was considered its native prerogative in the
West. The passionate whim of the moment for "a
grey eye or so " was no more to them than toothache
or the pangs of indigestion, an aberrancy from healthy
nature, to be checked and healed as soon as possible.
I found that I was far in the rear of their advance in
respect to love. My Western heroics and amorous
transports were discounted and yet curiously watched
as the antiquated manners of an age long gone by.
Nothing gave so keen a shock to my self-approval as the
smile that played upon the face of Thyriel when I first
broke into the raptures of adoration for her which are
the natural expression of passionate love in my native
Europe. Romeo-and-Julietism had been consecrated
by centuries of the traditions of Christendom as the
true attitude and conduct of lovers. And here was I,
only fulfilling the instinct and bursting into the ap-
propriate transports of passion, reined in by what I
thought at first the cynicism of my Juliet. The smile
would have been cynical on the lips of a young Euro-
pean inamorata. In Thyriel it was no more than the
amused recognition of manners which she had laughed
at in studying the ancient history and literature of the
island, as if I had seen a comrade in the commonness
of European daily life adopting the language and atti-
tude of Homeric or Ossianic heroes.

I grew ashamed of the amorous ardours of the West,
and, when I felt the tendency to erotic idolatry come
upon me, I kept it to myself. Even then I knew that
I was centuries behind my Limanoran coevals in the
rational guidance of the sexual instinct. Nothing
brought this so clearly to my mind as the reception of
the book of Asexuality. During its dramatic publica-
tion I looked round to see the shock of unnatural

454 Limanora

innovation on the faces of the audience, or the shrinking
of modesty, or the sense of outraged religious or tra-
ditional instincts. But there was none of these to be
found there. The ideal was accepted at once as the
proper and possible goal of the race, and the book was
treasured amongst the sacred literature of the time.

It soon flashed upon me, too, as I frequented L,oo-
miefa, that their art had all a far higher purpose than
I had conjectured from my European experience. It
was not meant merely to stir or to satisfy the sense of
beauty and harmony, but to implant in the emotions
and the imagination the love of the future and the
passion for rising in the scale of existence. I grew
ashamed to think that I had attributed to this wonder-
ful people the frivolity and even lowness of aim that I
had so often seen in European art. Here was a drama
that the West had not even a conception of. At its
best the stage of Europe professed to educate by repre-
senting heroic scenes from the past, by evolving from
them lessons for the audience, and by stirring their
enthusiasm for great deeds of history or myth. In its
commonest mood it reproduced in mimic form some
scene or action from contemporary life. At its worst
it was but a pander to the survivals of a gross and ani-
mal past. What I now thought of as the Linianoran
stage was wholly occupied with the future, so far as it
was a possible evolution from the present. The noblest
ideal that the imagination of the race could shape was
brought dramatically before the people that their
thoughts and ambitions might be fixed on something
beyond themselves.

For this high purpose and not for luxury or personal
enjoyment their sculpture and painting and music had

Pioneering 455

been developed, and the newest discoveries and inven-
tions of science had been brought to their aid. There
was no objection to what gave pleasure; but to spend
the thought and effort of the fully developed human
mind on that alone was, they held, a degradation:
Strenuous endeavour towards a higher and better future
was the note that characterised their pursuits. But, if
they could add attractiveness to the prosecution of the
aim, the task was all the easier; if they could make
the path ahead beautiful and pleasant so as to decoy the
reluctant senses onwards, the pace would be all the
swifter.

Even with this high aim, I could not understand how
this people, who loathed all pretence, could condescend
to their dramatic art; for on this stage of Loomiefa
were members of their community representing in their
persons what they were not and could not be for many
ages. And I had heard them often decry the histri-
onic art as one that encouraged in the actors a habit of
delighting in mere semblance and superficial show, a
habit that is the basis of hypocrisy and deceit; whilst
the love of mimicry and pageantry, I had been led to
believe, had vanished from the island at one of the last
purgations of the race.

The seeming contradiction was afterwards explained.
As one of the necessary steps in my initiation into the
privileges and duties of the mature citizen I was led
behind the scenes. Through the gorge at the upper
end of the valley I passed into a great hall that seemed
to me a combination of a -museum and workshop.
Here were the youth of the Loomiamo and the Fra-
loomiamo at work upon automata and the elaborate ma-
chinery that would guide their motions. Had I kept
at a distance from them as they worked, I would

456 Limanora

have thought that the play of human sculpture was
being again enacted, such exact reproductions of the
human system were the figures that grew under their
hands. In one section stood thousands of what I
would have called statues, which had served in the
publication of former books. In another the puppets
were going through dramatic scenes by way of experi-
mentation, and in many the illusion was complete; I
should have said that human beings were talking and
acting. In others there was some imperfection, and
there one could see that they were all mere fantoccini
galvanised into life. In a third section the tissues and
parts that were to make mimic men and women were
being manufactured ; the workers and artists could
draw on Rimla for as much force as they needed, whilst
the advice of the scientific families was at their com-
mand. The machinery of the great workshop was
bewildering in its complexity and refinement. The
finest tissue or nerve of the human brain could be
here imitated so that under a microscope I would have
said it was part of a living body.

After all it was only the acting of marionettes that I
had seen upon the stage in the valley. But it was
greatly aided by another department where the pio-
neering families cultivated the art and science of
illusions. They could imitate the human voice at any
point in the valley measured to the fraction of an inch;
they could reproduce any scene of history, of contem-
porary existence, or of futuritive fiction so exactly,
making it so full of the lights and shadows of life and
of the developments of all advance, that none of the
senses unaided by the reasoning and analytic faculties
could assert that the men and women were not living,
and that their actions and words were not real. Even

Pioneering

the electric sense could be deluded by the impulses man-
ufactured by these machinists and illusionists; it would
take the magnetic thrills it received for genuine en-
thusiasm and sympathy from the mind of a man or from
a crowd. This department was even more important
than the factory of puppets; for it made the play of the
marionettes look still more human on the stage. After
all it was not the puppets themselves I had watched
with such breathless excitement, but a mere illusory
picture of their proceedings; the illusion was far more
lifelike than the play of the marionettes themselves.
So much stress did they lay on stirring the imagination
and emotions of the race in favour of the ideals of the
future that half the work of these two families con-
sisted in the dramatic publication of their books.

The next sacred book I saw produced in Loomiefa
would have of itself persuaded me that this people
could have nothing to do with the histrionic art or any
art that would encourage the habit of pretence and
show in the individual nature. It was called the book
of Human Transparency and described the various
methods by which the inner working of the human
brain could be made patent to Limanoran senses. The
tissues could be clarified; the significance of every
fibre and nerve could be made familiar to all as an
essential part of their education; the eye, the ear, and
the firla could be made more subtle and acute in their
perceptions, till at last they were able to tell in a mo-
ment everything that was proceeding beneath the skull
and within the heart. What was done slowly and pain-
fully by the medical elders with the help of their instru-
ments, their hypnotic powers, and the interpretation
of dreams, every man would be able to do instantane-
ously, and without extraneous aid, exceptional wisdom,

458 Limanora

or occult powers. The general drift of a neighbour's
emotions was known to everyone through his magnetic
senses, but not the particular intention or thought;
this would be known only after the long course of
training and development mapped out in the book of
Human Transparency.

One of the chief ethical purposes that had in recent
times been fixed in the mind of the community was to
eject from the human system all elements and processes
that were offensive to the finer feelings and senses,
everything in fact that a man or woman might be
ashamed of or wish to conceal. The new book of the
time aimed at extending this to the operations of
thought and emotion. To get clear of the waste pro-
ducts of the mind in a way that would be inoffensive to
others was an ideal they had not yet been able to enter-
tain. They had learned with much pain and self-
denial the habit of concealing the crude processes of
thought that lead to what is worth saying or doing. It
was one of the things they were most ashamed of in
looking over the history or the memorials of their far
past to see the vast amount of the raw digestion of
thought and of the refuse of emotion that was made
public, and even put into literature meant to be per-
manent. Most of the orations and magazine articles,
and ultimately most of the books that had been pro-
duced in past ages were much the same as if the
stomach and intestines of the speaker or writer had
been anatomised and laid open with all their offensive
processes to the gaze of spectators. One of the most
beneficent events of their later history had been a con-
flagration in their valley of memories; for it had wiped
out of existence the libraries and art accumulations of
many centuries, of which they had come to be ashamed.

Pioneering 459

They could not understand the long-past stage of their
civilisation, in which men, and especially young men,
had been so proud of displaying the mere debris of
their worst and crudest processes of thought; it had
actually been the case that most of the literature and
art had been produced by youths under fifty years of
age, who had not yet begun to appreciate the differ-
ence between the processes of thinking and the results
of thinking; and one of the most extraordinary feat-
ures of that period was that the most applauded literary
and artistic productions, those that were supposed to
be most distinctively the outcome of what they called
genius, were the work of boys and girls, mere children
under twenty-five years of age. Natures that should
still have been in the nursery for many a year were
stimulated to address the public and seek applause with
work that was merely tentative and disciplinary. The
result was that, on the one hand, one half of the most
original and promising minds racked themselves to
death years before they should have faced life, whilst
on the other a juvenile ideal was set before literature
and art, and boys and girls became their chief audience
and most powerful arbiters. They felt heartily ashamed
of that singular stage in their development, and were
glad to have accidental fire come to their assistance in
huddling its products out of sight.

One of the first instincts they evolved after the series
of purgations was the desire to conceal within their
minds what was crude or mere process in thinking,
and, still more, what was mere waste product and re-
fuse of the mind. Instead of being eager to speak out
or publish all that came into the thoughts, bad or good,
they grew shy of public exhibition of their projects and
schemes till they had been shaped by long years of

460 Limanora

thinking and experimenting, and criticised and checked
by the caution and wisdom of their fully matured
nature. Publication became the last resort of the
mature and old instead of the first ambition of the
young, so afraid were they of exhibiting what might
be crude or offensive. Even in the give and take of
conversation and social intercourse they preferred long
periods of silence to the utterance of truisms and com-
monplaces. The trivial and conventional in speech, as
in life, was what they abhorred, as revealing an intel-
lectual nature on the road back to the infertility and
childishness of barbarism, the elaborate mechanism of
thought whizzing round without connection with what
represents work.

But now the book of Human Transparency proposed
as an ideal to eject from the system every process of
thought and feeling that they might blush to let others
see. If the nature was made transparent then would
it become a self-preserving instinct to develop their
natures in this direction. Everything crude or false
or offensive, that might begin to show itself in their
minds, would be at once suppressed before it got head-
way, instead of having to be slowly reasoned out of
existence with the aid of the moral instincts,. This
accomplished, the race would be able to take another
great leap forward. The advance of their processes of
thought and feeling to the level of the former results
of them would give them a higher point of view from
which to look forth into the future.

A mediate book, soon afterward produced by one of
the Loomiamo, supplied one of the steps towards the
consummation of this ideal. It was the book of Ethe-
real Nutriment. It took as basis a former discovery,

Pioneering 461

the liquefaction of air, and showed how, by similar
methods, the medium that filled interstellar space could
be made available in the halls of nutriment and medi-
cation, and how it could be manufactured in such a
concentrated form as to allow of its being poured along
conduits and imbibed by the human organs through
the mouth and nostrils, just as air was. For some
time the atmosphere had been distilled in liquid form,
and supplied to the houses of the citizens absolutely
rid of all impurities. Nay, it had been made a fountain
of power, transmissible to long distances, and available
in a form that was easily carried. Compressed and
liquefied, it rapidly returned to the gaseous form as
soon as the pressure began to be removed. And the re-
equilibrising of the liquid to the expansion of the sur-
rounding air had been made to supply vast quantities
of power in the centre of force. The new book pro-
posed to find in the compression and liquefication of the
ether an infinite fountain of force that would enable
their civilisation to progress at an ever-accelerating
pace.

But the most immediate effect proposed by the book
was to enable the Limanorans to etherealise their bodies
by introducing the liquefied ether into their dietary.
The result would be that the tissues would grow more
diaphanous. They had already been able to transport
some of the universal medium in their anchored va-
cuum faleenas from the outer margin of the atmosphere
to their laboratories, and now they had been able to
find it in their manufactured vacuums. With the
enormous power they had in Rimla they could easily
compress it into forms that would touch the senses,
and enter into the blood and the formation of the tissues.
As the medium of light and magnetism it was almost

462 5 Limanora

certain to make the human body more translucent than
it had ever been. All the tissues, even the osseous,
had always been pervious to light, but many of them
not apparently so to the untrained human eye. Re-
cently their lavolans had shown that by means of cer-
tain kinds of luminous rays the human system gave up
its most hidden secrets to the human eye. But once
they were able to chemicalise and compress the luinin-
iferous ether into palpable form, and to mingle it with
the volatile food that could be taken into their bodies
as they breathed, there would be no need of lavolans
or other apparatus to see the inner movements of the
human system.

The sanitary effects of this advance would be no
mean result. The medical council would have much
of their time set free for their ever-pressing investiga-
tions; they would not be needed for the diagnosis of
deteriorative symptoms in the tissues; each individual
would be able, by the aid of magnifying mirrors to
examine for himself what was going on in any part of
his system; and every man had sufficient physiological
and medical knowledge to understand the beginnings
of all the ordinary diseases, and, if he recognised them,
to prescribe for himself the hall in Oomalefa that he
should frequent in order to check them. Now it would
be only the symptoms of obscure or new diseases or
deteriorations of the system that the medical elders
would have to diagnose. And thus they would have
great tracts of their life to devote to new discoveries,
and medical science was certain to advance more
rapidly.

Another sanitary effect of the new permeability to
light would be to render the human body less open to
diseases either known or unknown. For it had long

Pioneering , 463

been a commonplace of medical science that sunlight
reduced the vitality, and therefore the virulence, of all
noxious microbes; after nightfall their power increased
tenfold. Wherever the sun's rays could not reach by
day, there diseases multiplied and festered. And one
of the chief reasons why, in their far past history, in-
curable maladies were generally internal, was that
sunshine could not get to the parts affected except in
a feeble and straggling way. The fact that they had
fixed themselves deeply in the tissues before they could
be observed, and that it was difficult to get at their
roots without cutting a passage in to them had been
generally accepted as the explanation of their fre-
quency and deadliness. But it had been one of the
most important discoveries of the new era after the
purgation period, that pure oxygen and pure sunlight
were the most medicative of all things, and that the
nearer any affected part could get to them the sooner
it healed. The new book of Ethereal Nutrition pointed
out that one of the results of rendering the human sys-
tem easily pervious to light would be to rid its internal
parts of all trace of immedicability ; sunlight, permeat-
ing the inner organs and tissues, would make any
noxious microbes that might lodge in them innocuous.

The reciprocity of suggestion and discovery was
never more saliently exemplified than by one of the less
immediate results pointed out by this book as likely to
flow from the attainment of its ideal. Volatile ether-
food, gradually introduced into the halls of nutrition
and gradually increased, would, step by step, bring the
human organs to adapt themselves to existence outside
of the atmosphere of the earth. For a long time they
would be amphibious, with organs adapted to both

464 Limanora

aerial and ethereal life. Even as it was, the human
body revealed in it traces of having already passed
through an amphibious stage. There were in the neck
glands that were the remains of gills, which must
have once belonged to an aquatic habit; besides, there
was the last vestige of an eye in the back of the neck
still extant in the pineal gland, and this could have
been of use only when the ancestor of man was passing
through the stage of a water-animal which must
watch his enemies from the surface, his body being
submerged and out of sight. Step by step he aban-
doned the water for a littoral, and even at first arboreal,
habit; the result was that the gills came to be unused
and closed up, and the upward-looking eye was useless
in a head that was held upright and could be turned
swiftly in all directions; still man retains the memory
of the aquatic stage of his ancestry in the ease with
which he learns to swim, and in his love of a life on
the sea; whilst an occasional birth in more barbarous
tribes with the webbed toes of a water-animal still
showing reveals his ancestry atavistically.

What was to hinder him, now he had the mastery of
himself and his destiny, becoming again amphibious
in a new way ? Without guidance of his own, driven
only by the forces of nature, he had risen out of the
waters that once covered the earth, and taken to dry
land; for a long period he had been able to live at will
in either of two elements, air and water. Where
lay the difficulty in making himself again capable of
living in two elements, in air and in the luminiferous
ether? In prehistoric times nature had worked her
evolution in his system by long and slow stages. But
in lyimanora progress had become lightning-swift, and
would again and again increase its pace. For there

Pioneering 465

man had taken command of nature, and made her ac-
commodate her step to his stride. She was his willing
servant, nimble as her own electric flash. He could
now compress the work of centuries into hours by his
concentration of power in Rimla, and by his countless
ingenious contrivances. Thought was the lord of time
as of space, and thought was now his essence and
characteristic. He could, if he wished, contract the
process that used to cover geological ages into a gen-
eration. There was no reason why he should not be-
come amphibious again in a less grovelling sense than
of old within the few centuries of a lifetime. This was
the purport of another production of this time, the book
of Amphibious Existence.

It was a mediate book, one bridging the gulf between
things as they were and the far ideals held out to the
race by the Fraloomiamo. It helped to point out the
steps towards the realisation of one of the most
cherished productions of the age, the Book of Emigra-
tion. It had been many years in the maturer minds of
the community before I was introduced to Loomiefa
and its wonders, and it had recently been much modi-
fied by the discoveries of the new outburst of energy
that followed Choktroo's attempt at invasion. Its
ideal was to enable the L,imanorans of that or some
future generation to travel thought space and reach
other stars.

Long ago a publication that had prepared for, and
demanded this, was the book of the Destiny of the
Earth. It had made a profound impression on the peo-
ple when first produced; for it dramatically painted the
horror of death that would settle on this globe. It had
been proved by both astronomers and physicists that

466 Limanora

our orb was gradually losing its heat by the same pro-
cess which had brought its originally glowing surface
to a state that would allow of life settling upon it.
First, vegetation and animal life were found at the
poles, where the lessened heat of the sun made the ter-
restrial heat endurable; then they crept their slow way
onwards to the equator, till the whole surface of the
earth teemed with vitality, at first developing towards
vastitude in the warm vapours, in later periods towards
concentration of energy in special points of the animal
body, and especially in the head. Round the poles at
last settled the ice-sheet, advancing at long intervals
towards the tropics, now in one hemisphere and again
in the other, according as the one or the other was
farthest in winter from the sun during an extensive
period. The hyperborean powers shepherded the
growing life of the earth down into her central belt.
But the brumal shepherds of the one side of the world
receded as those of the other advanced with their arctic
winds and fleecy drifts. Within measurable time this
alternation would cease, and the glacial fences would
move forward together north and south, and pen the
overcrowded human life and energy with all its ene-
mies into the narrow equatorial belt.

It was the drama of these boreal limitations that the
book of Terrestrial Destiny pictured. The teeming
life weltered over sea and land alike in search of foot-
hold and nutrition. No inch of tropical earth was
sacred from brute appetite. Animal and man fought
with venomous passion for dear life. Not animalculae
alone but beasts, and even man, became parasitic.
Creatures that had loved a free existence in vast prairies
or forests learned to nest and hibernate in the folds
and hollows of larger animals. Life swarmed over life

Pioneering 467

till for lack of food it began to fail. Man crept with
loathsome beasts of prey into caves of the earth, and
grew as loathsome in his troglodytic habits. On moved
the brumal prison walls. The sun shrivelled in the sky
and withdrew his heat. Nothing lived that was not
arctic not even amongst the still-free birds of the air.
Man finally ceased to have faculty enough to notice the
shrinking of the already narrow enclosure that was
soon to be his grave. Feebly the last remnants of the
race stole forth into the struggling rays of daylight and
killed everything of life they could find. Only in the
sea still lived their possible prey and food, and thither
they dared not go beneath the gloom of the thick ice.
The cannibal habit came upon man again and no re-
lationship or love restrained his appetite. The last
scene of the drama was the death of the last man, the
grave of the remnants of his race; where he fell, there
he lay embalmed; and his tomb was the earth's own
winding-sheet. The meagre relics of terrestrial life
soon followed him into silence and darkness, and
through the sunless night the dead orb wheeled round
the extinguished cinder which had for so many geo-
logical ages given it light and life.

The publication of the book would have frozen the
hearts within them, had not the Limanorans known
that that was not the end of all. They saw that the
alternations of death and life were not confined to the
vegetal and animal species around them. The same
pendulum swung through the whole cosmos. The
universe which was dead now would live again in
blazing rounds of vapour that would solidify and cool
till life could settle on the new orbs again. Dead it
only seemed. For it never rested but revolved round
some centre revolving ajso, and too distant for man to

468 Limanora

see or feel. Out of these motions would come resusci-
tation. After millions of ages, that are but as moments
in the history of the cosmos, it would encounter an-
other exhausted universe, and from the collision would
a new system of glowing worlds arise, ready for another
series of vital colonisations from the limitless life of
sidereal space.

It was this knowledge that took the sting out of their
sadness over the new book. Yet the fate of man, age
by age more closely penned in by the walls of his
glacial-coffin, and drawn back by the eddy of time into
his primeval savagery, left a loophole for despair and
palsy to enter into their lives. Were they to let their
descendants fall back again into the beast, whence their
ancestors had come ? Was this glacial prison and tomb
to remain a possibility and a shadow on even the dis-
tant horizon of their race ? Once before had their an-
cestry evaded such a fate, penned between the invasive
glaciers and the sea; once before had the race com-
mitted their fates to an element they feared and hated,
lest -the encroaching ice-sheet should smother their
civilisation and reduce their vitality to the level of bar-
barism and at last annihilation. Better to let the race
die out at its noblest than leave it to go down into such
an inferno. Nothing now so made them shudder as the
prospect of retrogression, however slight. But to think
of their civilisation ebbing away from their posterity
before the waning power of the sun and the earth, to
think of the lapse of their own intellectual mastery of
nature into decrepitude and putrescence, was to turn
their hearts to stone.

Under such a prospect they could not sit in intellect-
ual paralysis. For years the imagination of the race

Pioneering 469

worked feverishly towards its rescue from such an
appalling destiny, and every new scientific advance
brought forth a new book of Emigration. Their one
thought of escape was taken from their old migration
out of the reach of antarctic glacial advance. To sail
out from the earth and commit themselves to the
strange conditions and uncertainties of a new element
seemed no more hazardous to them now than in their
primeval stage of land-civilisation to launch out with
their lives in their hands upon the unknown and terri-
fying ocean. It was urged that there was precedent
and basis for their marine adventure in that their an-
cestry had been amphibious, and that one of the prim-
eval species out of which they had come had been
aquatic. The reply was that the case was parallel and
not antagonistic. The original vital germs that set-
tled on the cooling surface of the globe must have
come out of sidereal space, and must have lived in the
element that they would have to cross in emigrating
from the glacial orb again; and from these vital germs
they, and all living terrestrial things, had evolved. It
was only one stage farther back in the history of life;
the precedent was the same, though the training and
modification of the system would have to be more
strenuous and drastic than they had been before the
former leap was taken from land to sea. Preparation
had already been made; for they had learned aerial
navigation far more thoroughly than they had ever
known the mastery of the sea. Their air-ships had
ventured right up into the ether, whilst on wings they
had themselves coasted the earth's atmosphere. No-
thing was impossible to intellect which had mastered
the art of evolution.

Recent discovery had led them far on the difficult

47° Limanora

ascent towards safe departure from the surface of the
world. It only needed ingenuity and development to
give them a concentration of aerated sustenance, which
would enable them to journey for ages outside of an at-
mosphere such as they had been accustomed to inhabit;
they had the germ of this in the nuts of the alfarene or
oxygen-shrub; recently their chemists had been able to
reproduce the essence of them, and to compress it into
microscopic globules. Not till a later age of discovery
did they supersede this by the liquefaction and solidifi-
cation of air. They were rapidly adapting their own
systems to the vacuums they could produce and to the
rarefied atmosphere high above the clouds. They were
introducing the quintessence of the ether into their
halls of sustenance and medication, and thus accustom-
ing their organs and tissues to conditions which they
would meet continually on their voyage through sid-
ereal space. The next generation would practically
be amphibious, able to live in the luminiferous ether
with occasional return to an atmosphere such as sur-
rounds the earth. Kvery new age would enable them
to make longer and longer excursions away from the
bosom of mother-earth out towards the influence of
other planets. Kvery new generation would have more
elastic and adaptable tissues and organs, which would
fit varied pressure and varied mediums of vitality.
And with all this the lyimanoran body would grow
lighter at the same time as it would grow more consol-
idated, coherent, and indissoluble. But most important
of all was the new command of gravitation given them
by the discovery of the varying sensitiveness or non-
sensitiveness of certain rays to magnetism and gravity
according to conditions that were in human hands.
There were limitless possibilities in this for sidereal

Pioneering 471

migration. And already out of it had come the lavo-
lamma or gravitation power-machine.

The new book of Emigration brought all these dis-
coveries and thoughts into bearing on its problem and
harmonised them, and developed them by means of
imaginative suggestion. The drama of its publication
drew the bulk of the people to Loomiefa. There we
saw a representation of Lilaroma itself, piercing the
sky in pure and lonely grandeur. Near its top lay
moored a fleet of faleenas of strikingly new form and
material; they were as light as foam-bubbles, and as
opalescently transparent; within each of them we could
see stored quantities of alfarene globules, that seemed
enough to serve a people for thousands of years; in
each we saw a new anti-gravitation engine, ready to
deal with every form of attraction and repulsion in the
wide ether and turn it into available power. Men and
women in Limanoran form, but as transparent and as
imponderable and buoyant as their new ships, floated
round the ethereal fleet. Now and again a flash of arti-
ficial light would dart across the scene, and along it, as
if impelled by it, ran with lightning-swiftness one of
the rainbow-flecked faleenas, bearing its full freight.
We could see the lavolamma work, and we concluded
that there was a new form of it that could take advan-
tage of beams of light to travel with them, as an elec-
tric impulse travels along them. Innumerable evolu-
tions with the ethereal fleet took place. The sublimated
Limanorans of the future seemed to have complete
command of the new ships and of the new power over
light and gravitation.

Suddenly came tremors in the framework of the
great mountain. It rocked like a buoy in the uneasy
surge of a reef. Its snows fell in huge avalanches.

472 Limanora

Then the conical top was ejected into the sky like a
shot from a cannon. The air was thick with dust and
stones. But when it cleared and great flames shot
forth and licked the face of heaven, we could see far
above their reach the rainbow-coloured fleet speeding
aloft, filled with their tiny diaphanous sailors.

The scene changed, and we saw universes set in the
vault of heaven, and across the space between them we
could discern minute specks of light flashing mercurial
as thought. Behind them in dim eclipse sped the
noctambulant earth, still eddying round the central
spot of light; now it broke forth in ragged coruscation,
only to sink back into pitchy gloom. Yet a thread of
light stretched forth to the luminous atoms that flitted
on through the night. Nearer they came and, one by
one, grew more distinct and larger. At last we could
see that it was the fleet on its way from the top of
L,ilaroma. Within each ether-ship we could make out
the movements of the sailors as they bent its way this
side and that. The light from a brilliant star in the
new universe made play upon the surface of their fa-
leenas. They had caught in its rays, and were speed-
ing as swift as light towards the now-definite goal.
The luminiferous current bore them steadily on, their
little engines palpitating with the impulse of the new
light and the new gravitation.

Again the scene changed, and we looked upon the
surface of a new orb, more advanced in vital develop-
ment, more highly organised than the earth with which
we were familiar. We saw the inhabitants in crowds,
face upwards into the night, all eyes upon some distant
star. The excitement was rising like a tempest. It
seemed as if the object on which they gazed were
swiftly approaching them. And in a flash there swept

Pioneering 473

within oar sight the fleet of prismatic ether-ships, like
rainbows in the light of another sun. They stopped
and hovered above the atmosphere. We saw their
crews breathe in the elements in which they floated.
Lower and lower they came, still sounding the atmo-
sphere and testing its effects upon their organs. The
absence of commotion and the steady descent showed
that nothing alien to their systems had yet been en-
countered. Out of their faleenas they gazed as won-
deringly down upon the new star as its sea of upturned
faces watched their slow descent.

The scene was brought still nearer to our eyes. In-
stead of microscopic foam-bells floating in the sky, and
microscopic crowds resting on the surface of the other
world, we felt present at the meeting of these creatures
of different universes. They seemed to feel conscious
of this great event in the history of the cosmos. The
dwellers of the new world were almost paralysed at
first with wonder at these beings so like and yet so un-
like themselves; they could recognise, we could see in
their friendly faces, the divine community of spirit;
their eyes, as soon as they recovered from their waking
dream, flashed welcome in magnetic fire; there was no
need of community of words for open intercourse; the
dwellers of the new star had the same development of
electric sense as the Limanorans had; their souls could
speak without a sound from the lips.

Step by step their mutual sympathy grew more
definite, more cordial, and approximated to the com-
munication of thought and fact. Within a brief period
they knew enough of each other's language to tell out
their whence and whither. But in the people of the
new star the language was that of feature and not of
tongue. Over their faces flashed the signals of thought

474 Limanora

as well as of emotion, astonishing the newcomers at the
rapidity with which expression flitted over their feat-
ures. Equally astonished were their hosts to hear the
countless variety of tone and accent come from the
throats of the strangers. They covered their ears as
if shielding them from the assault of some thunderous
report. Even the voyagers shrank from the voice of
their own spokesman. And, tone it down as he would,
still was it too loud for any delicate ear to endure.
They were in a new atmosphere that bore sound so
quickly and clearly as to make a whisper reverberate
like thunder. So did it make the eyes of the dwellers
in it as keen and far in sight as if armed with the most
powerful microscopes and telescopes. The slightest
adjustment of them and their lids changed them back
and forth from distant observation to near. And the
same translucency marked their tissues as made the
inner movements of the newcomers' heart and brain
apparent. There was needed no sound to interpret the
magnetic messages of the brain along its nerves.
Hosts and guests were seen at one, familiar as lifelong
friends and thrilling each other with the strange new
experiences of their history. The voyagers from earth
soon knew why the use of the tongue and throat had
been abandoned by their hosts as means of commun-
ication; the uncontrollable volume of sound offended
their hearing, and drove them to develop the language
of eye and feature; the sight grew more powerful and
adaptable as voice and ear gave up their share of the
energy and sustenance of the system; their tissues,
too, had ever been to a large extent transparent be-
cause of the rarity and clearness of their atmosphere,
and by selection and training they had been able to
make them pellucid as they now were.

Pioneering 475

The gleam of question and answer showed as clearly
on the stage of Loomiefa as the movement of the figures
themselves. And, when the colloquy had ended, and
the strangers had gained all the information they
needed for their farther journey through space, we saw
them enter their faleenas and rise above the eager,
penetrating gaze of their new friends. Across the face
of the heaven we followed the ethereal fleet as it faded
again into insignificance. Another scene showed us
their landing upon another planet of the universe they
had entered. The drama thus bore us with delight
from system to system throughout the cosmos, and re-
vealed the ease with which stellar voyaging could be
accomplished, once the initial difficulties had been
overcome.

A mediate book, dramatically published in Loomiefa
just before, prepared the way for this. It was the
book of Sidereal Intercourse. They had always held
that the other universes in the cosmos were as much
inhabited by life as theirs was. It had ever seemed to
them the absurdest of arrogance for the dwellers on
the earth to assume that theirs was the only orb out of
the countless myriads on the face of night that had life
upon it; that it monopolised the vital energy of in-
finity, and the attention of its divine intelligence. The
wider they had ranged with their sidereal sciences, the
more they smiled at the primitive thought of their re-
mote ancestors that they were the cynosure of the cos-
mos. It had come to be used as the readiest and most
striking example of infatuation and conceit. That the
poor earthlings were as microscopic in their import-
ance compared with the vastitude of existence, as the
bacterial swarms of a wayside pool compared to the

476 Limanora

denizens of the great ocean, was assumed in every
movement and act of their minds.

And, wherever life was, there was the chance that
highly developed intelligence existed. They were not
so sure that this was yet the case on the farthest of our
planets. It might be that the inner and smaller bodies
of our universe had passed the stage in which they
could support the higher life. The others, the}7
thought, were rapidly evolving a life of their own,
most of it still in a low grade; when the earth had
passed its climax and begun to deca}', they would
probably, one after the other, be attaining to a loftier
type of life and intelligence. Whilst they were run-
ning their course of progress the earth and her inner
sister planets would be waiting in their frozen silence
the time when the whole of their universe would be
exhausted. Nearer and nearer would the whole solar
system be approaching some other system that had
run its course; and the encounter of the two would
evolve a young universe, full of heat and energy
enough from the collision to make a new cosmic
career.

They had little hope then of stirring reply, if ever
they were able to send an embassy of thought to any
star of our own system. All their hopes of astral inter-
communication were pointed to other stars and other
universes; and, as they looked up into the eyes of
night, they seemed to feel magnetic answer to the im-
pulses of their souls, not from Mars or Venus, from
Saturn or Jupiter, but from the stars that throbbed
in far more distant depths. They had ever believed,
of course, and they had now scientifically shown, that
the centres of light flashing in the nightly sky were
not the true sisters of earth but only suns, round

Pioneering 477

which the unseen universes circled. They tried to find
the dim worlds which drew their heat and light from
these poignant watch-fires of heaven; and their more
recent instruments had revealed the dark outlines of
many of these twilight wanderers which hung on the
radiance of the visible stars. The magnetism that
came with the rays from some of those far distant
luminous points had shown striking aberration early
in its course; and nothing could explain this but the
existence of rayless planets revolving round these lam-
bent sources of light. Step by step had they homed
these aberrations, till they knew the courses of the
dusky satellites of many stars, and they could tell the
moment when a circular shadow would cross the face
of any one of these suns.

The eyes of the astronomical families had become so
accustomed to the times and places of such obscurations
that their firlas acted with them and searched for mag-
netic impulses from the dark sisters of the star they
were watching; till at last they could tell by their
electric sense the place of many dim planets in the
nearer universes.

It was on this that the book of Sidereal Intercourse
based its forecast of the immediate future. Since the
definite discovery of varied types of life in the spaces
beyond the earth's atmosphere, the last suspicion of mere
fancy had vanished from the belief in the existence of
high intelligence on the universes of infinity. And
now their faces were set towards communication with
some of this intelligence on distant worlds. The new
book assumed that the electric sense, or something
equivalent for the perception of the great cosmic force,
had been developed in the inhabitants of some invisible
worlds; and it laid down as an axiom that there were

47$ Limanora

vast stores of magnetic material in these orbs, just as
there were in the earth and in the sun.

What they must first do was to sweep the range of a
universe with an electric impulse on which the whole
force of Rimla should be concentrated, and to keep
their delicate indicators all set in the same direction.
At the publication of the book in lyoomiefa we saw
gigantic engines slowly moving their long arms this
way and that athwart one of the most brilliant stars of
night, and scientists eagerly scanning the numerous
magnetometers that surrounded the huge electric ma-
chine. We could see the air thrill and undulate with
the mighty impulse, and the very light of the star
seemed to flicker and wink before the penetration of
the intrusive force. At last a flash of hope came over
the faces of the watchers; the pendent beam of one
sarmolan began to quiver. It was a message from the
world they sought. Again they turned the whole
available power of the island — millions of millions of
horse-power — into the electric engine, the arm of which
they had at once brought to rest. Fierce lightnings
again played through the atmosphere, marking the line
of the new despatch. And again the luminous tongue
of the magnetometer told of its reception by intelli-
gences like ours. Then came the astronomic families
who marked the exact position of the sensitive spot in
the sky. And thereafter their sentry stood with sar-
molan directed thither, ready to announce the slightest
sign of astral impulse or response.

The scene changed, and we saw a new type of elec-
tric engine placed in position on the stage. On its
long arm was a singularly crooked cage of transparent
irelium, flat and sharp like the blade of a sword yet
bent into a right angle in the direction of the edge.

Pioneering 479

Within it were placed recording magnetometers. We
could see the directors fix them towards their respon-
sive universe. Then Rimla concentrated its tremen-
dous power upon the machine; the arm swung right
and left, and finally with a jerk shot the crooked cage
like lightning through the air. We followed its lum-
inous track far into the sky, till it seemed nothing but
one of the countless stars that silvered the night. Sud-
denly, like a rocket, it bent back on its course, and as
swiftly retraced its flight. I thought to see it shattered
into dust as it struck the earth, but there was a deep
pool ready to break its force. Its sharp edge cut the
water and it vanished, but slowly rose to the surface
unhurt, and on the faces of the observers we could see
how successful had been the experiment with the limo-
tar, or new boomerang vehicle of electric indications. It
had shot far up into space along the true electric impulse
that travelled away beyond it towards the sensitive point
of sky they had discovered. Before it bent back from its
headlong course, the response, speeding more freely
and more swiftly through the untrammelled ether, im-
printed itself upon the face of the sarmolan. It was
this answer, more decided than any they had yet re-
ceived, that filled the eyes of the observers with joyous
light.

There was another change of scene. The gigantic
engines had disappeared and in their place we saw the
ether-courier families floating on the outskirts of the
atmosphere with strata of clouds far below them. On
the back of their necks, where the electric sense had
its special seat, they bore a singular apparatus, not
unlike a small telescope. On their chests they had
strapped a small engine of irelium, a miniature of
those we had seen in former scenes. The one was a

480 Limanora

magnifier of electric indications, and the other was an
electricity catapult. The couriers could not only draw
upon the electric resources of the spaces around them,
but upon those of the centre of force. And we could see
them converse with distant stars by means of these ap-
paratus. Through unobstructed space they could send
with ease their electric impulses to limitless distances,
free from the atmospheric retardation which before
had demanded immense power to overcome its inertia.
And with their new- electro-telescopes they could mag-
nify ten-thousandfold any electric ray for their firlas to
receive, although it might have travelled a thousand
times the distance between the earth and the sun.
They might have to wait days for their answer; but
again and again were they rewarded with it. With
the dim stars circling round the nearer suns they were
able to hold comparatively rapid converse. But they
were going farther afield through the cosmos, and they
had often to watch and wait for weeks or months or
years for any indication of response.

The book awakened little enthusiasm compared with
the publication of some of those that I had witnessed.
For, though the authors had been rapid in the compo-
sition of it, they had been somewhat forestalled by one
of the ingenious inventions of the last great age of dis-
covery. This was the modification of the lavolan which
brought them records of the life of extra-aerial space.
Amongst the luminous impressions that their combina-
tion of lavolan and faleena had brought down out of
the ether, they had found evidences of highly organised
systems which frequented the vacuum outside our at-
mosphere. They were satisfied with the knowledge of
this new-discovered teeming life, and they believed that
before many ages they would have developed, first

Pioneering 481

their apparatus, and next their senses, so far as to open
intercourse with it. And if they could come to con-
verse with nobler intelligences near the earth, they did
not need to go so far afield in the cosmos as the new
book suggested. Their own filammus would serve to
bring them into close sympathy with the best life that
was to be found in space until they should know the
conditions of such life and aim at fulfilling them.

It was one of the subsidiary studies and ideals of the
book that drew most attention and produced most re-
sult. It pictured an apparatus and method for tapping
the thoughts of men as they travelled along the nerves,
an adaptation of their huge electric engines for sidereal
intercommunication. For some ages they had been
able to send emotions and impulses through the air, or
rather through the medium that interpenetrated the
air, and recently they had developed this into the de-
spatch of thoughts through long distances. The combi-
nation of great magnetic power and sensitive sarmolans,
this book showed, would draw off thought at any point
along its line of flight whether in the body or in the
air; and underneath an electric magnifier and inter-
preter the indicator would reveal the meaning of the
thoughts. Thus would they be able to find out the in-
tentions of men, however distant. But this was only
a minor result of the ideal. They would be able, with
the aid of the apparatus, to tap the torrents of thought
speeding through the ether, and so drink of the high-
est intelligence and imagination which approached the
earth. Much of it would be too intricate and abstruse
for them to follow or understand. But they already
knew that most of their greatest inspirations had come
from this ocean of tremulous energy, bordering the
shores of our world ; and development of their faculties

482 Limanora

and of their sympathy with this extra-terrestrial thought
would gradually lead them to the interpretation of its
more complex and deeper elements. All their civilisa-
tion had been an attempt to know the thoughts that
lie in the structure of our universe, in its complicated
energy and minute life. By this new means they would
feel the throb of the very heart of our system, per-
chance of the very heart whose beats are the life of the
cosmos; at least they would get to know the intelli-
gence that flashes through space around our world, the
wisdom and the inspirations passing between the in-
habitants of the ether beyond our grosser senses.

Had it not been for this minor issue and ideal, the
publication of the book would have been completely
overshadowed by that of the book of Immortality.
This took as basis the great expansion of life they had
been able to produce and their ideals of ethereal nutri-
tion and amphibious life, and pictured the posterity of
the lyimanorans able to join the inhabitants of the
ether without any violent transition or death. We
saw a L,imanoran on the stage in L,oomiefa passing
through the new transmutation from mortal to im-
mortal. His transient elements were atom by atom
sublimed away in a new hall of medication, where
magnetic energy took the place of more material nutri-
tion. His tissues became diaphanous, till only the
light and the magnetism he emitted marked the place
where he lay. It was what he thought and felt rather
than what he was that told us he was still there. His
lower and more stagnant centres of energy had van-
ished; and gravitation seemed to have little or no in-
fluence upon him. Whithersoever his thought willed,
thither he floated, rather the luminous reflection of a

Pioneering 483

man than the man himself. To our grosser senses he
seemed as impalpable and evanescent as a perfume or a
mist on the morning hills. Yet there he stood or moved
an inexpugnable centre of the highest energy, whither
flowed the sympathetic force of other centres, and
whither nothing hostile could approach. Storms
passed effectless over his head; the deadliest engines
shot their darts at him in vain; poisonous fumes, lethal
showers, armies of pestilential microbes, swept round
him and through him innocuous. All the evanescent
centres of energy that had laid him open to the attacks
of these, had dissolved and left him fit to be a dweller
in the infinite ether. There might be other noxious
elements, to whose assaults he was yet vulnerable; but
these we could not discover. He was immortal as far
as terrestrial enemies were concerned, immortal with-
out the sudden collapse and dissolution of the lower
centres which we call death upon our world. By the
most natural of processes he lost the substance that
awakened our grosser senses and became the mere
halo of what he had been, fit only to make himself felt
by our centres of thought and imagination. With our
firlas we could feel stream from him great currents of
magnetic influence, unobstructed by any of those ter-
rene or aerial media that make spiritual intercourse so
difficult upon this world.

Such an ideal, when attained, would spread what is
now called death over the greater part of our terrestrial
lifetime, instead of massing it into a few moments of
farewell. It would be difficult to fence off the im-
mortal from the mortal, so many stages would there
be of transmutation. The intercourse between the
immortalising and the immortal would then be con-
tinuous and there would be no sudden break in

484 Limanora

existence, no great gulf fixed between the spiritual and
the material.

With the same corporeal and mental faculties which
their ancestry had had in primeval ages, and the bulk
of men had in their own day, they would have counted
immortality as the gift of a friend. Even with their
existing development, noble though it was, they would
never think of longing for such a fate; for the lower
centres of energy, forming what is called the body, still
demanded an amount of attention and sustenance that
was burdensome. They had great delight in their life;
they energised so purely and continually that they often
forgot the corporeal system and its claims. Yet the
time came in all men's lives when they felt their still-
mixed constitutions advance too slowly for their spirit-
ual ambitions; and then they longed for change,
perhaps rest, such as the dissolution we call death
accomplished. If, however, they could get rid of the
inferior and clogging elements of their systems and
float free of terrene forces and conditions like gravita-
tion, then might immortality be an object of desire.

A publication that delighted them even more than
this was one that had a cognate theme, the dimension
of time. It seemed to me the most fanciful of all the
productions I had witnessed in Loomiefa. Yet it did
not seem to strike the L,imanorans as beyond the
bounds of possibility. It was called the book of Time-
focussing. So fantastic and Utopian did I think it that
I paid little attention when it was dramatically pub-
lished on the stage. Yet I remember some of the chief
features of the new book.

It counselled the development of the imagination on
its prospicient side till it should count aeons as mo-

Pioneering 485

ments and take easy flight through eternities. It was
the real time- faculty, and had already in the produc-
tions of lyoomiefa forerun the civilisation of the race by
long periods. It had become true prophet not merely
over months or years, but over centuries. Trained to
use the data of the past and the present, it had been
able to forecast the evolution of the future with a cer-
tainty that made its art almost a science. What was
to hinder extending its range of vision beyond the im-
mediate horizon, and taking in at a glance the course
of the future as it did the page of history ? And as it
reached higher and higher points of view, it could
paint eternity as' it now pictured the past. There was
no limit to its previsional powers, as there had been
none to its penetration into the prehistoric and prim-
eval darkness. Prescience should be as organised and
exact as any science. In fact all their sciences had be-
come presciential, those that were merely retrospective
or synchronous having gradually fallen out of notice.
And the families that had been devoted to them were
one by one absorbed into other services. No study
was counted of much value that had not one eye on
the future. Their whole intellectual system was thus
becoming futuritive, and all the faculties looked up to
and centred in the greatest and most predictive of them
all — the imagination.

They had already been able in the valley of memories
to focus the past into the view of a few moments or
days or months. The time stretching behind us into
the darkness was underneath one glance of the intel-
lectual eye. Only greater certainty in their imagina-
tive methods was needed for the eternity that stretches
in front of us to flash before the soul in a single picture.
Only develop the prophet- faculty as rapidly in the next

486 Limanora

few generations as it had been developed in the past
few, and we might move at will from age to age of the
future, as we now move from age to age of the past,
living at any moment in any period we pleased, or in
a thousand periods at once. From past to future
would be as easy a leap as from hell to heaven for this
great time-and-space-focussing faculty. Eternity would
be as focal to imagination as infinity. It was an eye
towards which radiated all time and all space. Post-
historic pictures would be as vivid to it as prehistoric.
Even now interest was fast leaking from mere recorded
history before the romance of eternity past and future.
What was the history of the race upon earth, compared
with the periscope of the cosmos ? Then would their
posterity be able to stand on a watch-tower in the
heights of heaven, and view the whole arena of exist-
ence as it stretched through time and space. There is
no faculty so close to the divine as imagination.

I felt that this publication was like all their work,
singularly self-regardless. It clearly recognised that
the realisation of its proposed ideal would mean the
doom of its art. Pioneering, all of theirs which we in
the West would call literature, would be superseded.
L,oomiefa would then become an institution of the past,
less and less interesting as but a rapidly receding item
of history. Self-effacement for the sake of progress was
the dominant note of L,imanoran civilisation. And in
this book it seemed to me to rise to its highest pitch;
for it held before the race a goal, which, when attained,
would render literature and its publication unnecessary
to its advance.

CHAPTER VIII

ANOTHER THREAT

WHEN the island was absorbed in the productions
of this new literary or pioneering era, its
attention was suddenly called to its immediate sur-
roundings. Out of eternity they were jerked into the
passing moment to defend their own little plot of earth.
Mere existence was endangered if they did not at once
withdraw their powers from their march through the
future. It had been the result of their humane and
lenient policy towards their exiles that every few gen-
erations rebellion and menace rose in the archipelago
against their mysterious isolation. Fear of the isle of
demons awed the imaginations of the other islands
for a century or two, and then foolhardy prosperity, or
conquest, demanded a new lesson.

Half a century had not passed since the romance of
Choktroo's rise and fall; and unaided and unstimulated,
the other inhabitants of the archipelago would have
grovelled in helpless fear and hate of the central isle.
The discipline applied in the repulsion of Choktroo's
fleet would have sufficed for several centuries, but for
a new power which had insinuated itself within the
circle of mist.

487

488 Limanora

One of the days when the book of Emigration was
holding the stage of Loomiefa, the spectators were
startled by realistic transference of their drama to the
sky above them. Just as the opalescent faleenas were
about to land on the new star, every eye was suddenly
drawn away from the stage to the blue spreading above
the valley. Across it was passing a strange airship of
huge proportions and ungainly structure. I recognised
it as a development of the balloon, with which I had
been familiar in my European experience. There was
the immense inflated globe, or rather pear, with the car
hung underneath; but there was something new in the
motions of this balloon. It seemed to be dirigible, for
it tacked this way and that across the direction of the
wind. And still more strange, the car was filled with
implements of war; I could see their great muzzles
pointed over the sides.

The Limanorans were startled by this anticipation
of their science, but only for a moment; and as soon
as the apparition sailed out of sight, they bent their
senses as eagerly on the spectacle before them. They
knew that their sentries were at their watch-posts on
Lilaroma, and nothing hostile to the interests of the
civilisation could occur in air or sea or upon earth with-
out stirring their attention, and so placing the whole
island on the alert. They waited till the publication
of the book was finished and then streamed off to their
various businesses and pursuits. As we flew across the
upper slopes of the mountain we found out that the
aerial stranger had settled upon one of the lonelier
heights of the island of Broolyi. No action was taken
by the lyimanorans against the singular invader of the
archipelago, except to set a special watchman who
should observe his movements through the idrovamo-

Another Threat 489

Ian, and should report to the elders anything out of the
common that might occur.

The stranger had evidently been disabled away to
the east of the circle of fog; his steering-gear had
ceased to act, and before a tornado he was hurried away
from the great continent over which he had hovered.
The impetus bore him helpless above and across the
ring of mist, and within its calmer sphere the steering-
gear was again adjusted. It was then that the watchers
on Lilaroma saw his purpose to make for their island,
and they sent through the lilaran a blast which would
carry him away from their shores, not rude enough to
harm him, yet sufficiently strong to defeat his inten-
tion. Feeling himself borne again farther away from
his home he tacked for the nearest peak that he thought
he could reach. This was evidently Klimarol. But
the blast of the lilaran was too much for him; and to
save himself from drifting still farther west he grappled
one of the heights of Broolyi as he passed over it, and
settled there.

It became one of the amusements of the younger
Umanorans to observe the behaviour and the fate of
the newcomer in the isle of peace. The crew of the
airship was numerous; they were taken prisoners not
long after they had descended from their car, and their
captain was hurried off to the court of the new ruler.
Before long the balloon was brought to the capital and
carefully guarded; and, anchored firmly to the earth,
it made ascents with the royal engineers under the
direction of the balloonist. His every movement was
watched lest he should release the captive by cutting
the rope that bound it, and sail off with the officers of
his Broolyian majesty. But as the months and years
passed on, the newcomer with his strange new ship

49° Limanora

came to be trusted by the king and his advisers. He
saw an arena for his ambitions and talents, and bent
his whole energies to his new purpose.

We could see him from day to day and week to week
add to the aerial fleet, which he at once began to build
in imitation of the balloon he had brought with him.
His original subordinates and companions were at first
his only assistants, but the Broolyian engineers and
mechanicians afterwards joined in the work in great
numbers, and became as deft at it as the strangers.
Every new balloon that was made was tested in the air.
At first there were accidents, which for a time preju-
diced the court and the people against the aerial mon-
sters. But by carefully selecting his men from the
army the director was able at last to furnish every air-
ship that he made with a complete and efficient crew,
able under the leadership of one of his companions to
manipulate the vehicle and every implement on board
of it. It even became the favourite pastime of the
court to make voyages across the island in these swift
frigates of the sky.

Ultimately the king so thoroughly trusted the master
of this new style of transportation that he abandoned
himself to his guidance and allowed him free use of all
the resources of the island. He came to see the mar-
vellous possibilities that lay in warfare carried on by
such a navy. Though the Broolyians had, after Chok-
troo's deportation, lost one by one all the conquests
that that audacious warrior had made, and had at last
been confined again to the limits of their island, they
never gave up their ambitious dreams. And the mon-
arch who could fulfil them would be certain to fix his
empire in their hearts. The new king looked round for
some means to gratify this passion for conquest. But

Another Threat 49 l

their old methods were now comparatively useless; for
the other large islands, warned by their past experi-
ence, built fleets as large and formidable as the Brool-
yian, and the smaller groups confederated for the pur-
poses of defence. It was vain then to think of re-mas-
tering the archipelago in any attempt by sea.

With extreme delight then did the monarch watch a
demonstration of the warlike possibilities of the new
air craft. The director had some old hulks moored out
at sea in sight of the king and his court. Then he en-
tered one of his new balloons, well provided with guns
and explosives and well-manned, and bade the crew let
go. They sailed straight out till they rose high over
the remains of the antiquated navy. As they ap-
proached their prey, several guns belched out their
fires from the car, and their shot struck and sank three
of the ancient ships. But two tough old hulls resisted
all their attempts. So the balloon rose straight over
them, but much higher in the air. Out of the car was
seen to fall two packages, which made for the decks of
the old tempest resisters. In the twinkling of an eye,
before we could realise that the packets had reached
their destinations, there was a thunderous roar, and
the air was filled with jets of water and with the flying
fragments of the shattered hulks. When the commo-
tion settled, nothing but floating planks and spars and
shreds of the vanished ships was to be seen on the sur-
face of the water. And away out of reach of the fierce
convulsion rode the airship majestic and unharmed in
the blue.

The monarch need no further demonstration. He
gave up to the master of the new power the use of his
whole army and navy. Before many months were over
a vast aerial fleet was equipped and manned ready for

492 Limanora

the first emergency, and this emergency arose at once.
The sullen jealousy which ever smoulders and rankles
between two powerful and neighbouring empires took
substance and outward shape between Aleofane and
Broolyi. The old enemy knew nothing of the new in-
struments of war which had been forged, and prepared
with cheer and good hope for the struggle. Her fleet
was in excellent order, well equipped and manned, but
within a few weeks it had completely vanished before
the wrecking terror of the air. Continuous torrents of
lead and iron streamed from above onto their decks,
making those of their gunners that survived helpless
and inert. And when their captains invented methods
of pointing their guns at the aerial ships and of floating
fire-kites against them to set them on fire, then the
most tremendous engines of the navy in the air were
brought into train; and with appalling explosions the
Aleofanian ships and their crews vanished in atoms.

No such destruction of a nation's war material had
ever occurred in the history of the archipelago. The
Aleofanian marine force was swept from the face of the
sea. One or two other islands were bold enough to
attempt the struggle with the new power, but with the
same disastrous results to themselves. Over the whole
archipelago except its central island the air- fleet passed,
inspiring terror and reducing the peoples to servitude.
It was the same all-conquering story as was told under
Choktroo's leadership.

And now the Broolyian army and people were will-
ing to worship the maker and manipulator of these
balloons as a god. He had plenty of ambition; but he
was by nature and acquirement only a mechanician and
not a born leader of men. He had none of the self-
confidence made monstrous by success, or of the un-

Another Threat 493

scrupulousness, that forges the masterful will. He did
love power, but he hesitated before those audacious
measures which give a conqueror the highest vantage-
ground. He yearned to rule widely. But he had not
the self-mastery and the leavening imagination which
secure command over the minds of human aggrega-
tions. He was but an average nature with complete
mastery over the newest and most masterful in-
vention.

The Broolyian monarch saw the peril of his too great
success, and set the stranger and his balloons aside in
time to let the popular enthusiasm cool. Alone with
his fleet and his army the king completed the round of
conquests. He knew that when the power of Aleofane
and one or two other chief islands was broken, there
was nothing to fear from the others, and his task,
though brilliant, was easy. He took care that there
were several great and sanguinary battles that put
heart and pride into his soldiers and sailors. Thus by
the time the war was finished, the newcomer and his
appalling fleet were almost forgotten.

But the monarch himself did not forget them. He
knew that the climax of this new era of national con-
quest and pride was certain to come soon. Never had
the Broolyians been continuously successful in war
without losing their traditional fear of the isle of devils,
and demanding its subjugation. He set his house in
order against the day of vainglory. He would develop
his new method of warfare. He made the stranger
again his commander-in-chief, urging him on towards
the increase of the aerial fleet and of its terrorising
weapons. Then, fearing from his knowledge of the
past that there was little chance of success, he gave
him complete command of the expedition, so that all

494 Limanora

the blame of failure should be on the shoulders of an-
other. In order to complete the contrast, he kept re-
bellion smouldering in one or two of the adjacent
islands, and took care that it broke out simultaneously
with the attack upon the isle of devils.

Ignorant of the conditions he had to meet, and puffed
up by his past successes, the stranger thought that all
he had to do was to add to the number of his fleet and
the deadliness of his weapons. We saw him set out
with banners flying amid the applause and enthusiasm
of the people, whilst the wily king led off his own
forces, quietly to embark from an opposite shore of
the country against the rebels of neighbouring coasts.
Success seemed to follow the aerial navy, for favouring
winds bore them swiftly and majestically over the hori-
zon out of the range of Broolyian vision. For myself,
as I sat at an idrovamolan, I feared the strange new
torrential guns and the showers of deadly explosives
that would rain down from these aerial ships, and my
heart sank as I saw them sail like great vultures nearer
and nearer to their prey.

But my compatriots were tranquil and free from all
anxiety. Everything was really in readiness and they
were only awaiting the exact moment for action. It
came, and the huge balloons fell suddenly away before
the blast from the lilaran, like a flock of storm-beaten
birds. I could see them struggling, many of them
half disabled, to stand up to the wind. But it was
vain; they whirled like snowflakes before an arctic
tempest. Their helms became entangled in their
snapped cordage, and I could see their guns roll and
pitch with fatal effect upon the crews, till from many
the suicidal weapons were tumbled overboard into the
sea below.

Another Threat 495

Yet the expedition by no means acknowledged itself
defeated. Guided by some experienced Broolyian ad-
viser the admiral of the fleet changed its formation.
Evidently from knowledge that the blast from L,ilaroma
could play upon only one point at once, he divided his
air-navy into three squadrons, and making the central
face the blast, he sent the other two in different direc-
tions round the island. He thought that these two
would be able to bring their explosives and guns to
bear upon the lilaran by this flank movement. It was
as unsuccessful as his other efforts. Both sections
came almost within firing distance of the shore, when
suddenly their gaseous spheres were seen to collapse.
A slight and silent flash was all that told whence the
disaster had come. Electric rockets had issued from
magnetic ejectors of great power and almost invisibly
punctured the spherical supporter of each airship.

It seemed as if the whole of the three squadrons
would soon be in the sea, and with the weight of their
war material they were certain to sink to the bottom
and carry all their crews with them. But the invaders
promptly threw overboard their weighty cargoes, and
with their usual humanity the L,imanorans now did
their best to save their enemies. The punctures in the
balloons were so minute that it would take some time
to exhaust them. So the lilaran sent its blast under-
neath them and buoyed them up like thistledown, at
the same time blowing the three sections of the navy
off in different directions. It was amusing to watch
the alternate rise and fall of the various airships as it
turned its blast from one squadron to another, like a
game of battledoor and shuttlecock played by giant jug-
glers. The warriors in the cars kept crouching in
panic and holding onto the cordage, as they rose or fell

496 Limanora

in the air upon the billows of wind. Their cars danced
and leaped and jerked like corks in an eddy where
currents meet, and they were too panic-stricken or too
paralysed with terror to see that with all the tumult of
their movements they were gradually approaching solid
earth. We saw each squadron land on the shores of
a separate island; and after their terrible voyage the
crews threw themselves upon the earth and seemed to
clutch it, in fear lest they should be torn again from
its sweet anchorage into the warring whirlpools of the
upper air.

After a few days they collected their wits and the
shattered fragments of their air-fleet, and, hiring boats
from the islanders, sailed homewards. As they entered
the main harbour of Broolyi crestfallen and dispirited,
the army and fleet of the king were returning from
their victories with triumphal music and with banners
flying. The contrast was striking, and set the mon-
arch more firmly on his throne for another generation.

Yet matters could not remain where they were. The
defeat of the new methods of warfare stirred hope in
the breasts of the conquered peoples; and muffled
sounds of rebellion came from many of the islands.
The king knew that he must make some other move,
and held long councils with the defeated balloonist.

The result of the conferences soon became manifest.
The stranger had seen that his aerial fleet was useless
against tempests and electric missiles, such as the isle
of demons had command of, and he willingly handed
it over to his superior to use against the threatened re-
volts. With the blind obstinacy of the average mind
placed in a position greater than its powers, he ran
counter to the traditions of the archipelago, and uttered
loud resolves that he was not to be beaten; he would

Another Threat 497

show them how fertile he was in resources; he had no
fear of their bag of winds.

The king again gave him free scope with all the ma-
terial and forces of the country, and the ingenious
mechanician forged huge guns that would throw their
projectiles enormous distances, and built great ships to
hold them. As he launched one vessel after another,
he practised his crews on board of it, and taught them
how to handle the marvellous artillery. The people
stood in awe, as they heard the thunder of their fire
dozens of leagues away, and saw their missiles fall in
the sea miles and miles from the ship whence they had
issued; and they shook their heads wisely and said to
each other: " Now, we shall see at last an end to this
isle of demons."

When the great armada was all ready after long years
of work, and the ships lay at anchor in the harbour,
their magazines filled, their guns in train, and every-
thing prepared for the final expedition, the people were
so overjoyed at the sight that they organised a festival
to the sailors of the wonderful fleet. They had such
confidence in the destructive powers of these ships and
their guns that they resolved to pre-celebrate with
magnificent pageantry and feast the triumph they were
so assured of. And as the monarch had already de-
feated the incipient rebellion by his aerial fleet, and
the mutterings of the subjugated were stifled or un-
heard, there could be no danger in inviting all the sailors
on shore to take part in the festivities. So the great
fleet lay peacefully at anchor unmanned, whilst their
crews were being lauded to the skies for their intre-
pidity and the certainty of their success.

The night was moonless and deep darkness was

flecked only by the occasional blaze of sky-daring
32

498 Limanora

illumination. Everything had gone off with brilliancy,
and the banquet to the sailors was nearing its climax
§and close. Suddenly the hubbub of jubilance was
hushed; there was a series of appalling detonations,
shaking the banqueting edifice to its foundations;
many thought that the world had come to an end so
terrifying and ear-deafening was the continuous roar.
The people in the streets at first fell on the earth and
prayed to their gods. But they soon saw what had
occurred. There out on the harbour the pyrotechnic
display overshadowed anything they had ever seen or
even thought of. The great ships were all of them in
flames; the magazine of each had exploded, and sent
decks and fittings and armaments sputtering in frag-
ments against the black of the sky. The brilliancy of
the spectacle overcame the natural alarm and regret.
Such titanic Catherine-wheels they had never seen,
such rending of the heavens, such flame-lit jets of water
rising in columns above the doomed ships. But the
spectacle was brief. Ship after ship rose high above
the scene of its devastation, its banners of fire all flying
against the darkness, and then plunged into the ex-
tinction and gloom of the depths. The breach in the
side close to the magazine sucked in the waters most
swiftly, and sent the bow-end of each first to the watery
assuagement of her fires. In an hour after the first
deafening paroxysm all was still and dark again on the
face of the waters, but for a flaming fragment here
and there, hissing and sputtering against the night.

Then came terror again. The Broolyians, jubilant
over the invincibility of their marvellous fleet, knew
not whence the disaster had come or who had been the
enemy. And they now crouched in fear, or ran for
shelter, lest the invisible foe should take advantage

Another Threat 499

of their palsy and reap his harvest of blood. But no
enemy came. No carnage followed the strange catas-
trophe. The morning dawned, and the waters of the
bay shone as peacefully in the level rays of the sun as
if no fleet had ever been there, as if no conflagration
had occurred. Not a boat or sign of an enemy was to
be seen. Out crept the soldiers and sailors from their
shelters, the people in their rear, and soon the harbour
was- alive with craft, seeking relics and explanation of
the disaster.

But no explanation could be found in all the babel of
theories that chattered and echoed over the water. A
council of the royal advisers was called; they consulted
and questioned every admiral and general; but all in
vain. The stranger, who had brought the fleet and its
equipment into existence, failed to account for the oc-
currence. He refuted all charges of negligence, and
appealed to the desire of the people and the command
of the king as his warrant for withdrawing the crews
from the ships for the night. Treachery there must
have been ; there were a thousand conjectures, but no
sure knowledge as to whence it came. With the irra-
tionality and ingratitude which mark all panic in na-
tions or other aggregations of men when unexplained
disaster has overtaken them, they broke out in fury
against the very hero of the night's festivities. They
had to find a scapegoat and his figure was foremost in
every man's mind; the destructive magnetism of the
crowd gathered round the name that was on every lip,
and the cry arose that he was the traitor. The mob
howled outside the council-room for his blood. He
had to be bundled off by a secret passage to the out-
skirts of the city and thence into the mountains, and to
appease their frantic passions the king had to proclaim

500 Limanora

his exile, and to promise that no such engines of war
should again be forged in the royal armories. Fear
of the isle of demons again crept over the superstitious
hearts of the people. As they brooded over the mys-
tery, they felt that somehow or other it was connected
with that inexpugnable centre which had defied all
their efforts at its invasion.

And this was right. For the L,imanorans had watched
the long preparation for the assault, and made calmly
ready to defeat it. They knew that, if they ever al-
lowed the fleet to sail, they could not well beat it off
without loss of life amongst its crews. It could lie in
the shelter of an island some miles distant from their
shores and rain great projectiles upon them. The re-
pulse must be accomplished long before this had been
reached. They therefore waited till the ammunition
was on board each ship. Then, in order to avoid the
destruction of life, they sent into the air of Broolyi the
exhilarative magnetism required, and into the minds
of the inhabitants the suggestion that the whole fleet
should be f£ted. When the ships had been deserted
and not a human being was within reach of them, they
launched through the air in its direction a series of
electric shocks, which, as soon as they came in contact
with the metals of the magazine, ignited the ammuni-
tion. Most of the ships were set on fire in this way,
the rest by the falling fragments and sparks from their
exploding sisters.

Thus was the new threat to Limanoran civilisation
frustrated without loss of life or breach of the mystery
that sealed the central isle. But the waste of time and
progress upon such threats by the withdrawal of so
many L,imanorans from their ordinary pursuits was an
evil not to be tolerated. Something must be done to

Another Threat 501

prevent the recurrence of these expeditions. It was
generally from Broolyi they came, the result of war-
like ambition. It would be a service to the whole
archipelago to reduce this military people to insignifi-
cance and silence. There was no security in their
subjugation by the people of another island, for the
war-fanaticism would surge up again in a later genera-
tion. The conversion of them to a religion of peace
would mean no change in the blood; it would only
transform the method and cue of attack.

What was needed was the elimination of the ambitious
and military natures from the Broolyians. For only
the aristocracy and the descendants of the original con-
quering exiles had set their hearts on military pursuits;
the conquered and many of the families that came to
the island at later dates than the great purgation, were
not unwilling to keep to their own bounds, and pre-
ferred possession to dispossession. There was no need
of extermination of the people, but only decimation.
Nor would the Limanorans endure any shedding of
blood in the process. It must be gradual, peaceful,
free from torture and bloodshed, and almost unobserv-
able.

The physiological and physicist families worked out
a scheme that would fulfil all these conditions, and yet
finally eject the disturbers of peace from the archipelago
within a generation. The scare they had just suffered
and the exile of the balloonist ensured to Limanora
freedom from their attacks for some years. But they
aimed at permanent immunity and this could be secured
by nothing less than the sterilisation of the warlike
element in Broolyi.

The end was accomplished in the next aggression
upon a neighbouring island. The expedition was

502 Limanora

formidable, and included all the bellicose males of the
offending people. After landing, it lay encamped in
the open air; then a band of Limanorans set out on
wings by night, armed with a new surgical instrument,
called the idlumian, which could give an electric shock
to any part of the human system and paralyse it either
for a time or permanently, according to the power
put into it. They approached the whole army as it
lay asleep, and by the whiff of a soporific which they
diffused through the air, they steeped the systems of
the sentinels in lethargy and by the same means ensured
the depth and continuance of the slumbers of the em-
battled host. Before a single soldier had awakened
from his deep sleep, the whole Broolyian army was de-
fertilised without being in the least conscious of any
loss of vitality or manhood or enjoyment of life. When
the sentries awoke and the troops began to move about
in preparation for their struggle, the medical embassy
had winged its way back to Limanora. Not till twenty
or thirty years after did it strike the Broolyians that
the fountain of their military power was dried up, and
soon they began to attribute the strange infecundity
of their aristocratic and warlike families to the witch-
craft of the isle of demons, a belief that finally sealed
that centre of the archipelago as with walls of adamant
against aggression on the part of their neighbours.

My Western instincts, in spite of all my training,
would reappear at intervals — which happily became
longer and longer — and for a time I could not repress
my instinctive disapproval of the use of this idlumian
or electro steriliser. Yet my reason told me that it was
the only effective method of permanently stopping the
horrors of war in the archipelago. Heredity and cir-
cumstances would have circumvented any other blood-

Another Threat 503

less attempt at relief from the Broolyian nightmare. A
few discussions with my proparents made this rational
view of the matter dominant over the conservative in-
stinct in me, and before many years my instinct was
quite the other way; it became the ally of the reason;
and I had no need to argue with myself on the point
or confirm my faith by arguing with others who knew
better than I.

There was another Western instinct of mine which
gave me frequent though lessening trouble and came
into conflict with the reason of the community at this
time and on this topic. It was my approval of propa-
gandism. Into my blood had grown through the cent-
uries of Christendom the feeling that a faith could not
well prove itself unless it spread out amongst new and
alien peoples. It is the prerogative and principle of
belief to yearn for universality of acceptance amongst
human beings. And it urges on the devotees of any
faith to spread it through the world at all costs. After
centuries of propagandism the habit becomes an in-
stinct, and it seems to be a dictate of nature to attempt
to convert the world to the tenets which have grown
up in us from infancy and been incorporated into our
very life. The Christian has ever been from its outset
a great missionary religion, and it is difficult for one
brought up in Christendom to get rid of the missionary
attitude of mind which assumes every alien to it to be
sunk in wickedness and unprofitableness, and certain
to lose all the future blessings promised to true be-
lievers.

I could not obliterate this instinct wholly from my
nature, and whenever I reflected on the wisdom and
nobleness of the L,imanoran civilisation, or noticed the
marvellous progressiveness of some new phase of it, I

504 Limanora

found myself longing to go back to the Western world
with my knowledge. Thus I often drifted into appeals
to the propagandist spirit which I assumed to exist in
the breasts of my friends and fellow-citizens, but I was
not allowed to rest long in such dreams. Each time I
uttered or even thought over my missionary desire, I
was brought to book with the widest of knowledge and
the keenest of penetration into human nature and its
history. I felt that it was almost as useless for Euro-
peans to go out amongst the tribes of monkeys and
spend their lives trying to bring them up to such a
level of intelligence as is implied in the appreciation
of the Christian religion, as for the L,imanorans to apos-
tolise amongst mankind, and struggle to drag them up
to the stage of progress these islanders had reached.

But now, whenever my missionary moed returned
upon me, my friends would point with a smile to the
new invention, the electro- steriliser; and if pressed by
the disapproving skepticism of my thoughts, they
would urge in words the omnipotence of this little in-
strument as the apostle of progress. By this and this
alone was the snail-pace advance of mankind likely to
be quickened. Without more rapid elimination of the
unfit than was afforded by natural selection, sexual
selection, and the accidents of surroundings, there was
little hope of wise propagation of the human race. The
blunders and defects and maladies of every new century
were treasured up by heredity in the tissues of man-
kind along with any feeble tendency to advance that
might appear. The struggle was a losing one in spite
of the development of science and wealth. And all re-
forming theories and efforts were but stumblings in
the dark till there had been a thorough purgation of
traditional and epidemic diseases, moral as well as phy-

Another Threat 505

sical. Nine tenths of the race, as at present consti-
tuted, were unworthy to hand on their natures to
posterity. Under the regime of propagational license
universal among all peoples of the earth, the evil and
diseased multiplied at a much greater rate than the
sound in mind and body. The progressive element in
mankind was dragged back by the dead weight of the
criminal, the diseased, the habitually pauper, and the
naturally incompetent. Some religions even set them-
selves to encourage the vitalisation and propagation of
the last. It was noble and good to assuage the evils
that heredity had accumulated in their systems; but it
was anything but noble and good to encourage them to
perpetuate their misfortunes throughout a wide pos-
terity. " Multiply " should be the last word of an ad-
vancing civilisation instead of the first, unless there be
added to it the condition " only the best." And who
cares or dares to preach this true gospel of progress,
when it touches a theme that all are ashamed to men-
tion ? If ever there was a sacred mission upon earth
it would be that of the man who should go to the wise
and good men of all nations and put into their hands
the secret of the idlumian, or who should himself pass
round the world and sterilise all the morally or physi-
cally diseased amongst rich and poor, amongst gentle
and simple. Within two generations the races of hu-
manity would take such a leap into light and noble
vitality and love of progress as would make the most
brilliant civilisation of the past seem barbaric. Then
would they take command of their own destiny, and
look unflinchingly into the future for the path they
should take. Advance in material or in the accumu-
lation of force is vain, unless it goes hand in hand with
such universal moral and intellectual advance. It is

506 Limanora

progress in the human system through all its parts
that should be the aim of every race.

I gradually came to understand the importance they
attached to this new instrument as the most humane
and effective of missionaries. Had it come before their
great series of purgations, there would have been little
need for the expatriation policy. If they had had to
eject, they would have taken care that the different
sections of exiles should vanish in a generation. They
shrank from extinguishing the individual life that had
already been brought into being. They would have
had no scruple in giving euthanasia to an evil race or
a section of a race; for this meant only preventing a
posterity coming into existence to take up their burden
of evil. And even now it was a question to be seriously
discussed and answered whether they would not sweep
out the pollution from the rest of the archipelago by
the help of this humane little doorkeeper of posterity.
Would it not prevent the lifelong evil of thousands?
Where lay the humanity or love in allowing a retro-
gressive and unhappy race to hand on to myriads to
come the evil they had received from their ancestors ?

CHAPTER IX

POUTY

{WAS privileged to hear, or rather to be conscious
of, the discussion that the question of idluinian-
missionaryism underwent. I had now reached the age
and stage of my training which gave me the entry as
audience to the councils of the race. It would not have
been wise to admit to the treatment of difficult and ad-
vanced themes natures that were still hemmed in by
the limits of long-past ages of history. They could
not have sympathised in, or even followed, the attitude
taken up by the elders of the people; and they would
have gone back from the meeting with minds perplexed
and bewildered by questions too complex and futuritive
for them to fathom. Many of them would have suf-
fered a warping of their natures from the strain, and
this would have meant years of additional training
and care to set it right. The exclusion of the imma-
ture from the national councils was a matter of educa-
tional policy rather than of political necessity.

It was evidently for my own benefit that I was pre-
sent at the discussion of the sterilising embassy. This
was somewhat difficult for me to follow, for my mag-
netic power and faculties had not been developed
enough to interpret the silences between the rare

507

5o8 Limanora

speeches. As I sat, my mind ran back to a Quakers'
meeting to which I had been taken by my mother; then
much self-control had been necessary in order to re-
strain the expression of my amusement; now I felt as
if in the presence of gods who needed none of the bab-
ble of human speech to open a pathway from mind to
mind. I had sloughed off that singular prepossession
of the Western nature in favour of verbal intercourse
and had ceased to think that silence, where 'two or
three were gathered together, was a mark of inanity,
or incompetence, or at least passivity. I remembered
with a shudder the awkwardness that accompanied
social lockjaw, even where friends met; each grew
afraid of the thoughts of the others; none knew what
the silence meant; everyone was frantically searching
for something that would break the gag without ap-
pearing unnatural. Loquacity, instead of being a bar
to ideas, was counted an accomplishment; and freedom
of speech was one of the great political watchwords. It
was only on rare occasions that reserve was not con-
sidered a defect.

Now I felt that there was nothing so powerful as
these silences in council. The magnetism of thought
and feeling was flowing from mind to mind, all the
more that there was not a word or sound to interrupt
it. Now and again, when the divergence of thoughts
was dominant, one of the oldest and wisest would call
them in from their different tracks to a common centre.
Speech was rather a method of focussing thoughts than
one of chasing and criticising them. The speaker
would review all the mental discussion and concentrate
its lines, so that everyone present might have a view of
the whole field from a high point. It was marvellous
how rapidly they went though the business in hand by

Polity 509

means of these noble silences, broken by occasional re-
views. There were no displays of mental or stylistic
legerdemain, no appeals to common feeling, no captious
criticisms, such as form the staple of a debate in a
Western assembly even of the wisest men. Kvery fal-
lacy that crept into the discussion was unmasked in a
gentle, fair, and kindly way. There was no partisan-
ship, no war-whoop of prospective victory, no lash of
sarcasm, and they abhorred above all things the sweet-
ness of harangue.

Yet, the absence of Western methods of beating out
a subject was a disadvantage for me, who had as yet
little of the magnetic penetration or sympathy needed
for the appreciation of their meetings. But my deep
reverence for the humanity of the elders, and great
sympathy for their aims, made up in part for the lack
of magnetic interpretation of their thoughts. At the
close of the council I talked the matter over with my
proparents, and eked out my own observations and re-
flections on its proceedings and thus came to a just
view of the whole discussion.

They were strongly impelled by their love of the hu-
man race to the missionary course, which would now
be so simple and effective. Missionaryism before meant
the hoisting of every separate alien and barbarous na-
ture up to a higher platform, and continuing the pro-
cess with generation after generation, a gigantic task.
There was more chance of the missionaries levelling
down to the civilisation of their converts than of ac-
complishing their original purpose, while the arguing,
preaching, and persuading implied a Niagara of bab-
ble for centuries. Where would lie the compensation for
such abasement of the mind ? Now there was no need
of condescension; it was a mere matter of common

510 Limanora

professional work for the physiological families. The
glib energy of the old process was evaded and in its place
came the need of wide practical knowledge and keen
judgment. For tongue-force and subtlety of reasoning
were substituted physiological exactness and selective
talent. The process was now eliminative rather than
directly creative.

But such pleading ignored the true difficulty, the
acquisition of so large a knowledge of local and tem-
poral conditions as would enable them to foresee the
full effects of the step. How were they to be certain
that only the nobler natures would hand themselves on
in each race ? Streams from the barbarous and evil
past might flow through the mothers. Who could
guarantee that the reduced numbers of the next gen-
eration would be able to accumulate energy quickly
enough to keep the mastery of the earth against its
unreasoning and unmoral powers? As it was, the peo-
ples were able to fight with the seasons and the forces
of climate and weather, and with the exuberance of
the plant and animal kingdoms. If their numbers
were greatly lessened by the elimination of the coarser
natures, would not the balance be destroyed, and the
natural enemies of man have the best of it ?

Questions like these made them pause. To be able
to answer them would need prolonged and minute in-
vestigation of the human race and its conditions, per-
haps consuming centuries in the task. Meantime
their own forward march would have to be abandoned.
Omniscience alone could deal with the problem of mis-
sionaryism, and as things were, the omniscience of
nature was dealing with it. For evolution was proceed-
ing throughout the universe, however slowly. Those,
races that seemed to be laggards on the upward path

Polity 511

were evolving what was needed on their part for the
advance of the whole army of creation, and death was
ever opening new careers for the vital force of their in-
dividuals. It was difficult to tell without complete
knowledge of all the conditions whether the spread of
a certain faith or phase of civilisation was going to be
beneficent or maleficent for the world as a whole. And
all missionaryism that was not based on omniscience
was striking out a path through a jungle in the dark-
ness. Even the idlumian, unless amongst criminals
and the morally and intellectually plague-stricken,
might do irremediable injury to the prospects of the
human race. The problem of propagandism was, as
often before, abandoned as too complicated and too far-
reaching for limited knowledge and brain power.

But the discussion gave me an insight into what I had
long been, curious about, their polity and methods of
guiding the course of their commonweal. I had not
dared to inquire into the subject lest I should meet
with some rebuff, or find that I had been too inquisitive
where reverence was needed. Nor had I been able to
see much evidence of government or legislation, and
had almost come to the conclusion that there was
no such thing in lyimanora as sovereignty or state.
Though everything moyed with the harmony and
smoothness of perfect organisation I could never find
the organising hand.

At last I discovered part, at least, of the machinery
of government. There was one assembly or council
to which reformers could appeal with their schemes.
The whole community often assembled; but it seemed
to me that it was more for training, for the reintegra-
tion of some faculty or feeling, or for the purification

512 Limanora

and elevation of the life, than for legislative purposes.
The only trace of any approach to selection and de-
cision in these national gatherings was to be found in
Ivootniefa and in the linguistic assemblies; in the one
they practically accepted or rejected some proposed re-
vision of their ideals placed before them in a new book;
in the other they decided whether a new word, or the
adaptation or application of a word was worthy to live
or die, whether a new sense deserved to be kept alive
in a form set apart for it, or whether a new distinction
was real or merely verbal. I could see that these were
the two great functions of a national assembly, to ac-
cept or reject a new departure in life or in language,
to see that the path into the darkness of the unknown
was the right path, and that the verbal armour and
weapons they bore allowed of no enemy near. Dis-
covery and advance had their own pitfalls and risks;
but the language they used in investigation and re-
search was the most natural ambush of fallacies and the
scientific work of a generation might be rendered nuga-
tory by an ambiguous word or phrase. In past time
they could point out many ages, which had prided
themselves on the marvels of their progress in science
and were now regarded as barren and unprogressive;
their advance had been apparent and not real, a mere
change of nomenclature and not a change of ideas or a
discovery of facts. It was natural then that the com-
munity, as a whole, should, from the mere instinct of
self-preservation, keep the most watchful eye on this
unguarded frontier of language, and almost as eager
an eye on the regions that lay before them, the ideals
they were about to adopt.

I had now been led to see that there was a council for
the decision of foreign questions, for it was this that

Polity 513

rejected the new idea of the idlumian mission. I soon
came to recognise its domestic functions as more im-
portant than its policy abroad. The latter occupied its
attention only once or twice in a generation. Monthly,
almost weekly, it met to agree on questions and schemes
which had no connection with the world outside of
L,imanora. Now that I was inspired to attend its
meetings, I felt that it safeguarded the march forward.
It never passed a law; and yet its decisions were as
clear, as valid, and as universal in their effects as if
they had been written out, proclaimed, and printed in
a statute-book. All the parents, proparents, and guar-
dians were members of it, and along with them were
associated as silent, inactive members the young men
and women who had matured and had shown sufficient
of the wisdom and virtues of the race to warrant such
a privilege. These latter were in training for full and
active membership many years before their spirit and
influence were felt to have bearing on any decision.
On this basis I had been admitted to the meetings.

The scheme of every new book came before this
assembly prior to its publication in Loomiefa. Every
new departure on the part of any family was brought
up by its heads to be tested by the feeling of the
council. But it rarely happened that any scheme was
rejected; it was, as a rule, only revised and modified.
In fact, every parent or guardian was so keenly in
sympathy with the spirit and genius of the race that it
was almost impossible for any proposal or idea to come
from a family in antagonism to the general welfare
and feeling. One feature that struck me as mark-
ing their meetings was the absence of those search-
ing, flaw- finding criticisms we would have considered
absolutely necessary to progress in the West; every

33

514 Limanora

modification suggested was an improvement or addition
readily welcomed by the author and his family. The
council was there to help and develop, and not to be
hypercritical or censorious. Every thinker or inventor
was eager to bring his work before it; instead of fear-
ing its criticism as an ordeal he knew that his creation
would have its true spirit appreciated, and if there was
genuine and original work in it, it would meet with its
due; whatever was likely to aid the race in its forward
march would be welcomed and aided.

Another branch of its duties was the preparation of
practical problems and difficulties which were likely to
obstruct the national progress till they were solved.
The council thought over these as they came up in
their minds, and tried to get at their fundamental
form or principle. After having ruminated over them
for months, or perhaps years, it indicated the family
in whose province they lay, and handed them over to
it as part of its duty thereafter. In fact, the debatable
borderland between family and family was evidently
one of its most important spheres. Not that any
family ever desired to evade what might be included
in its functions or offices, but, on the contrary, was
eager to do all that in it lay for the benefit of the race.
Often, however, spheres overlapped, so that two differ-
ent families or individuals were doing the same thing;
and it was necessary to define and apportion the duty
of each.

In all the meetings and discussions I came gradually
to feel that there was a dominating spirit that influ-
enced from behind the scenes. I could see no overt
mastery or guidance of the proceedings, yet there
was manifest an organising power within its organism.

Polity 515

Schemes and problems came before it in lucid order
and a definite shape leaving no room for mere idle con-
jectures. As the treatment of any one proceeded, I
could feel the magnetism of strong, harmonious spirits
moulding and bending the thoughts. I knew that I
was in tutelage, although there was no open dictation
or even guidance.

After a time I began to trace the vigorous currents
of influence that swept us on with such force, to the
oldest men and women in the council, those who in
Europe would have been thrust aside as incapable of
good advice and as on the borders of second childhood.
I could see a tendency on the part of most members to
look to them for the cue, when thoughts had begun to
wander and part company. They did not claim su-
perior authority, but the deference to their opinion and
instincts was spontaneous and palpable, and often grew
into the deepest reverence. This would never have
awakened the notice of an unsympathetic stranger, so
little was the feeling expressed in open word or act.

In this way I learned, before many years' experience
of the council, that there was an inner council or cabi-
net, consisting of all the elders who had proved them-
selves able and wise by centuries of discovery, or
invention, or penetrative and far-reaching advice. I
could discover no formal election to it, everything in
the shape of definite constitution or government being
manifestly avoided. Age did not form the qualification
for this senate although all the senators were men and
women who could count their years by hundreds.
Many who were older than they still remained outside
the charmed circle. It was rather weight of experience,
and the fulness of development resulting from it, that
admitted. Whosoever by living long had made the

516 Limanora

most of life in the line of greatest progress was singled
out by the reverence paid to his lofty character and ex-
pansive wisdom, for the duty of piloting the race. It
took years of massive growth in personality and influ-
ence to make the community or the man certain that
he had been selected by the national spirit. The re-
sponsibility was so onerous that the wisest shrank for
years from it, fearing they had not developed suffi-
ciently. It was only with reluctance that they at last
listened to the call of their fellows and entered the
noblest of all senates. None sought the honour, but
once undertaken, none attempted to shift the burdens
of it onto other shoulders till the nausea of life, indi-
cating the approach of their mortal liberation, came
upon them. No one was jealous of their authority or
influence; for all knew that these they would have had
by virtue of their nature and advance, even if they had
no seat in this inner assembly. And every type of family
had its representative there, the ablest, the wisest, the
noblest, generally the oldest of the group, whether man
or woman. For there was great need in its councils
of someone minutely familiar with the practical func-
tions and duties of every science and art in the island.
Sex made no distinction in the choice; sex was a mere
accident in the realm of reason and wisdom; sometimes
the greater brain-power and greater moral and intellec-
tual development belonged to the male head of the
family, sometimes to the female ; and it never entered
the minds of this strange people to discount position or
influence because of sex.

In all differences of opinion their decision was final.
For everyone felt that the race could not possibly at
that particular stage of its progress attain to any clearer
light upon the subject than this areopagus had attained.

Polity 5i7

The upholders of the clashing views received the de-
cision as coming from a tribunal, the most impartial
and the farthest -seeing that could be found on earth.
But it was seldom that any division of view came as
far as a controversy which needed the influence of the
elders. Where two individuals or families began to
feel their opinions on any common topic drawing apart,
they each made eager efforts to understand the other's
point of view; and their neighbours, recognising a dis-
cord in the mental atmosphere, came in with reconcil-
ing magnetism and reason. Everyone was too anxious
to have the light of others' thoughts thrown on the
matters he had to investigate or consider, to reject in
haste a view that differed from his, or to let his own
view become unreasoning prejudice. I never perceived
among them any of that bickering or heat which so
commonly attends a misunderstanding in Europe.
Long after arriving in the island I still wondered where
their courts of law were; and thought there must be
some secret tribunal that dealt summarily with all dis-
putes. I came at last to see that there was no need of
courts of justice, for there was never any approach to
jarring or litigation; and, most of all, there was no
written law to appeal to. It was one of the primary
principles of their life that any law that needed com-
mittal to writing was either artificial, and so beyond
the necessities of the community, or implied a flaw in
the nature of the race* demanding instant attention.
Written law, like overt authority, was an evidence of
elements in a community which were alien and had
better be eliminated. Hostile individuals or factions
made a body of recorded laws, backed up by force, a
necessity throughout the nations of the world, and
rendered most of them practically unprogressive.

518 Limanora

Since the great series of purgations the spirit of the
L,imanoran community, working through the electric
sense, had been the master of its unity and progress,
and it appeared idle to make or write laws. Every ad-
vance it achieved made every individual at once debtor
to it ; all moved up to the new level. The laws, if those
principles which were continually being revised and
constantly progressing could be called so, were writ-
ten in the hearts and natures of the race; every new
amendment of them was the natural demand of the
racial spirit and passed at once through the elders, the
parents, and the guardians into the conscience of all
the families and individuals. Every man was a law to
himself, in that he knew and fully recognised the aim
of the community and the part he had to fulfil in its
advance. Those who were still in a state of pupillage
had each two elders as their guarantors and sponsors,
who watched the instillation of the common spirit into
them, and any flaw or discord rapidly made itself felt.
Reason was at the back of every word and act of the
Limanorans; a new feature or thought or discovery
had to prove itself worthy and real before it was ac-
cepted. There was no such thing as an appeal to
authority. Everyone knew that he would have to
reason out and make clear the nobleness of what he
expected others to believe or agree to. It was one of
the main functions, the most urgent duty, of the two
councils, therefore, to revise the axioms and postulates
in which the national reason found its leverage and to
see that they never became mere prejudices. Every
new advance antiquated some principle that had been
taken as axiomatic, or revealed the fallacy that lay in
some pivot-word. Any difference of opinion or of point
of view generally set the inner council on the alert.

Polity 5 19

Not infrequently they found that one investigator had
been misled by a verbal fallacy or a mistaken axiom,
whilst the other had in searching laid his mind open to
the light of truth. They never rejected as trifling or
insignificant any divergence in the views of a common
topic, but rather welcomed it as evidence of some long-
hidden flaw in the foundations of their reason.

Another striking feature of this inner council was
that their meetings were open to all but the young and
immature. They would have nothing to do with the
secret conclave, which, they held, was the beginning
and principle of despotism. Away from the sunlight
of truth and open thought the most ghastly spiritual
diseases of humanity sprang into being and flourished;
thoughts and feelings, otherwise healthy and un-
ashamed, became sickly, morbid, and often venomous.
Resolutions passed in secrecy need have no assigned
reasons, and are soon passed without discussion and
without any reason but the lower private feelings and
prejudices of individual members. A mystery is at-
tached to the proceedings of such conclaves that gives
well-nigh omnipotence to the terror they instil. Hence
until their doom is near they are by nature and of ne-
cessity despotism. To every meeting of the inner coun-
cil all active councillors of the larger assembly were
welcomed. But, when present, they kept silence, and
preferred to keep silence. Nay, it was considered a
special privilege for one of the senate to withhold his
thoughts from the discussions; silence for a year or two
was the hard-earned reward for years of painfully
guarded responsibility in debate. Not one of them but
looked forward to such a breathing-time for relaxation,
so heavy was the care of the future of the race. To
speak was the burden ; for speech must be weighty, and

520 Limanora

the recording linasans automatically treasured it up for
future years to shed light and criticism on it.

In fact their senate-house was arranged so as to be
a vast linasan itself. Nothing was needed at the end
of a meeting but to touch a spring, and the mov-
ing irelium-strip, on which the proceedings imprinted
themselves, was securely fixed on its roll and trans-
ferred to the valley of memories there to be laid past
in the archives for future reference, and a fresh strip
took its place ready for the next debate. Knowing this
each senator weighed his every word with the utmost
care. Whatever building was used as a meeting-place
for discussion by either the whole of the people or any
section of it had its dome constructed in such a way as
to serve as a collector and magnifier of sound, so arranged
that the sound should not echo back but pass instead
into the receiver of a great linasan and at once in-
delibly record itself, thus making every member of the
community set a watch upon his lips and allow only the
maturest wisdom to pass them.

The memories of the Limanorans were marvellous in
their precision and tenacity. They could ransack the
records of any man's brain in sleep with the greatest mi-
nuteness, though they did not care to use this process on
anyone beyond the stage of probation and pupillage; it
implied something not unlike prying into the secrets of
the nature. They knew, too, how inexact the senses
are in their reports of what takes place in the world
without. Refined and trained as they were, there was
always a liability to error. Whenever exactitude of
record was required they used machine-reporters which
never made mistake except when their gearing was out
of order. At all important assemblies and gatherings

Polity

521

they had an instrument called an idrolinasan which re-
corded in permanence not merely all that was said or
done, but the electric currents which passed from man
to man. Whenever they needed to verify a memory
of the past, the irelium-strip of the particular occur-
rence was brought out of the historical archives and
placed in the reversible idrolinasan, and the whole
scene flashed vividly before the senses. Doubtless this
custom of machine-recording made the Limanorans so
watchful of all they said and did and thought; and it
was perhaps this as much as any of the wonderful
features of their civilisation that quickened the pace
of their personal development in more recent years.
They made every effort their natures were capable of
to think and say and do what was worthy of themselves
and their people. Nothing retards the progress of
Western civilisation so much as the relaxed habit of
life that even the best men and women fall into, when
others are not likely to see or hear them. Religion
invented the all-watchfulness of God in order to provide
a substitute for the consciousness of the eyes and ears
of others. But it is too distant and incorporeal to
strike a highly materialised civilisation as real; and
the belief acts only for a brief period after it has been
impressed upon the mind. The economy of breath in
churches and of evidence in law courts would be so
great if some of those instruments were introduced
into the West, that Europe would not know itself within
a few years, it would develop and progress intellect-
ually and morally with such rapidity. But the most
striking result would appear in politics and legislation.
The machine would influence the speech and action of
the legislators as powerfully as if they believed every
moment that the omni-watchfulness of the deity were as

522 Limanora

real as the presence of the Speaker in the chamber.
There could be no revisal of its hansardisings; every
politician would be as true, as reverential, as weighed
down with the responsibility of his duties as if he were
before the final judgment-seat.

These machines had had a wonderful effect even upon
the advanced Limanoran polity. Not even a gesture
was wasted in their assemblies. Everything done and
said was relevant and weighty. The result was they
acted as if they were one man and their meetings were
brief and effective; where a Western legislature would
discuss a scheme or proposal for years, a few minutes
would suffice a L,imanoran assembly to get at the heart
of it, and accept or reject it. They seldom had to re-
trace their steps; if they did, the error was due to some
mistaken principle accepted in past ages as an axiom,
or to some undetected fallacy in a pivot-word. The
proposer of the scheme had the responsibility of making
every feature and consequence of it clear; he must not,
and would not, conceal anything that might militate
against its acceptance; he had discussed it fully with
his family, and seen in their criticisms and suggestions
everything that might be amended. There was, there-
fore, not a minute lost on defective arrangement or
statement.

It was astonishing how rarely the councils had to
meet, and how brief their meetings were. And this
was the reason why I had been so long in discovering
any trace of constitution or polity in their midst. One
of their favourite maxims was that an organism to be
Jiealthy must work without calling attention to itself.
And this is truest of all in politics. The government
that is never seen or heard or felt, and yet has no

Polity 523

secrecy or need of secrecy about its proceedings, is they
most efficacious and wholesome. Those loud demo-^
cracies which occupy most of their time in discussing
themselves and their systems are corrupt already or on
the road to corruption. And monarchies that have to
parade abroad in threats or expeditions are diseased at
home and afraid to become too conscious of their dis-
ease. "The minimum of government attains the
maximum of development," was another of their
favourite sayings. To keep this sentiment living, they
led their youth back to the study of certain periods of
their past that they were ashamed of, called the stag-
nant ages. Some of them had been republican, others
monarchic, some religious or superstitious, others
rationalistic or sceptical, some warlike, others peaceful.
Their one common characteristic was that the state did
everything for the subjects; the island was a nursery,
the citizens were infants; no one ever thought of taking
the initiative in any scheme; whenever anything was
needed, the state had to look after it; the chief duty of
a citizen was to talk and hold meetings and criticise;
to act was beyond his province; the state had to feed
and clothe him at last, and to drive him to his work
with the lash. It was the lash that disciplined the
army, and urged it on to battle. The state had within
it or in its service the few who retained activity or
energy; and these few knew how to fill their own cof-
fers better than those of the country. Then came dis-
grace and disaster. Prosperity and patriotism and
courage vanished in decay before the universal corrup-
tion on the one hand and the senile helplessness on the
other. And all that remained fell an easy prey to the
first ambitious marauder who invaded the island.
There grew up in the breasts of the L,imanorans an

524 Limanora

instinctive fear of all encroachments of the state on the
duties and functions of the family and the individual;
and those who formed the inner council were as deeply
imbued with this feeling as the rest of the citizens.
One of their chief duties was to draw the line with care
between what could best be done by the separate units
of the state, and what by the state as a whole. They
safeguarded the independence of the individual, and
encouraged his initiative in order that every tendency
to originality should flourish, and that the capability
of meeting emergencies should grow stronger and
stronger. Every man on the island knew that he must
act for himself in innumerable circumstances without
waiting for help or counsel. And the women were
trained to be similarly self-reliant. Readiness of re-
source, confidence, and courage were universal charac-
teristics of the people, and they knew from their study
of history, as well as if they had mastered it by experi-
ence, that dependence on the action of all and interfer-
ence on the part of the state would gradually destroy
these.

It was, of course, the elders who were most keenly
alive to this fact. In their councils they defined with
the most exceeding care what might be done by them
without injury to the habit of presence of mind and
spontaneity of action on the part of the individual citi-
zens. What they had chiefly to look after was the
future of the race; and everything done by the citizen
or the family that endangered this had to be reviewed
and corrected by them. But so powerful a private in-
fluence had each elder over every individual of his
family that interference in this respect was seldom
needed. The ideals held before the race sank into the
nature of every citizen and guided him in all his

Polity

525

actions, if not now in all his thoughts. The matters
that needed most deliberation were the revisal or ex-
pansion of those ideals, and the selection of pairs for
marriage and parenthood; they knew that a mistake
in either of these would lead to incalculable evil, and
would necessitate, in retracing the step, long years of
thought and labour besides the most drastic remedies.
The guidance of the great public institutions needed
little counsel or interference, but was almost automatic;
everyone concerned knew by instinct what he had to
do and had its interests so completely at heart that he
required no reminder of the details of his duty. The
inspection and review of the various departments were
rather the task of the expert families, and chiefly of
their elders, than of the elders as a whole.

But there was one department for which the inner
council or senate was wholly responsible. This was
Rimla, or the centre of force. Mechanical power was
the one thing, they had all along felt, that must belong
to the state and be controlled by the state. All other
possessions (wealth, property, reputation) were mere
symbols of it. To let it drift into the hands of indi-
viduals, who might grasp more than was good for them
or even monopolise it, was to endanger the future of
the race. Only the wisest and best and the most im-
bued with Limanoran ideals were ever allowed to con-
trol the concentrated force of the island. In fact no
one but a member of the inner council could be the
master of force, and his term of control was limited to a
few hours at a time, for which period he was chosen
from day to day from amongst the oldest and most ex-
perienced of the nobler-natured. It was the greatest
honour the race could bestow. To be trusted by the

526 Limanora

whole people with the management and distribution of
that which was the fulcrum of all progress was to be
marked out as one worthy to be divine. When I came
to understand this, I saw the meaning of the reverence,
almost awe, with which the master of force was pointed
out to me on my first visit to Rimla. I had not meas-
ured the greatness of his power, or seen that it was far
more real and comprehensive than that of any monarch
or despot that had ever ruled.

Where would their civilisation or their ideals or
great future be without this marvellous concentration
of naked energy ? What would have become of the
race, had a base ambition or an insane caprice entered
into the thoughts of anyone of their masters of force
while he held the reins of dominion in his hands? It
was the duty, therefore, of everyone who was elected to
the office, however often he had held it, however noble
he had proved himself, however trusted he might be by
all, to submit himself the hour before he entered Rimla
to the tests of the inner nature and thoughts that the
race knew, and this in presence of the oldest of the
senate. The workings of his brain and heart were
stringently investigated, and after that he was sent to
sleep, in order to have his dreams read and interpreted.
If any of the tests gave dubious answer, he resigned
his office and another was chosen in his place. For
almost a generation this had never occurred, yet the
precautions were as rigidly enforced as if the tests had
often revealed defects. For the master of force held in
his hands the key of their civilisation and progress.
To the elders all private ends and honours seemed
trivial beside the aim of the race, the only divine thing,
they thought, that they held in their hearts. To have
been able to substitute anything on earth for it even for

Polity 527

a moment was to them so absurd and insane as to ap-
pear impossible for any L,imanoran. All this safe-
guarding of the probity and the sanity of the masters
of force was therefore counted rather as a tribute to
the importance of the office than a slur upon the indi-
vidual.

It was not that private motive or stimulus had been
annihilated. On the contrary they considered that the
chief spur to progress was the struggle of the indi-
vidual in competition with his fellows. He who could
attain most rapidly to the ideal set immediately before
the race was a marked and striking personality. To
level all means of advance so as to make them the same
for all was to destroy this stimulus to development.
To be respected and at last reverenced by his neighbours
was longed for by every man in the community, and
everyone had his own special faculty and means for
gaining such respect and reverence. At the great pur-
gation of the island's socialists and thieves, private
property had not been abolished, but only disgraded.
The socialists had been willing to erase all other
methods of civilisation and progress for the sake of the
impossible dream, the equalisation of property; the
thieves had been willing to do the same for the sake of
the swift acquisition of their share of it. They kept up
an abnormal and morbid appetite for property which
raised it completely out of scale and proportion, com-
pared with the other symbols of power and means of
advance. It became a disease that perverted their
whole view of life, and nothing wholesome could be
done till they were expelled. After their expulsion
it was found that property lost its importance, and
the word "fortune" ceased to be identified with its

528 Limanora

acquisition. It fell to its natural and true position in
the scale of means of development.

The motive that the socialists had most prominently
put forward for their schemes, the benefit of their pov-
erty-stricken and starving brethren, had long become
too artificial to hoodwink the wiser patriots. Not since
the barbarous stage of their past had bare subsistence
been a struggle and aim in the race. They had become
too provident to allow population to outrun means or
demand. There never had been for centuries anyone
who needed his neighbour or the state to aid him with
food or clothing or other of the vital necessaries. If
there had, he would have been too deeply ashamed of
his mismanagement of his life, or his improvidence, to
allow anyone to know of it. The arrangements of the
state and the carefully proportioned size of the popu-
lation left no room for him to throw the blame on
others. The body of the people laughed at the social-
ists for the patent absurdity of their pretext, and helped
the wise leaders to drive them out. Even if this motive
had been the real one, to disorganise the whole political
and social system, and to throw overboard the aim of
the race for the sake of securing a beggarly pittance for
feebler folk who ought not to have been brought into
the world, and ought not to be allowed to perpetuate
their kind, was a monstrous waste of vital power.
There had become deeply implanted in them a racial
instinct that no step should ever be taken which could
in any way weaken or endanger the sense of individual
responsibility. They knew that no amount of self-
sacrifice, no kind of guaranty of certain subsistence on
the part of the workers in the state, would ever make
true and good citizens of those who had lost this.

Even when they had come to have a far more com-

Polity

529

prehensive and scientific command of the problem of
population, and when the communising of property
would have led to no evil results, they refused to think
of such a measure. Every man was allowed to ac-
cumulate as much wealth as he desired. But none had
now the ambition to accumulate it. And as soon as
communication with the neighbouring islands was cut
off, commerce ceased, and with it all opportunity for
growing opulent. Everyone had enough for his needs,
and these were great in a country so rich in resources
and devices and so rapid in its development. The
family safeguarded the solvency of every member of it,
as it guaranteed his capacity to do competent work for
the state and for himself. The state demanded nothing
that could be called taxation from the citizens; part of
their time, ability, and work was all that it required.
But it was one of the methods of showing patriotism to
give freely to the state.

It was indeed one of the chief reasons for the reten-
tion of private property that it allowed of an easy and
ever available means of cultivating benevolence. Per-
sonal work was a limited thing, and could be given in
aid of others only at fixed places and times and in
defined quantities. But if it could be concentrated
in private possessions, then there was ready at all times
and places and in any quantity the power of helping
others. Without it generosity and self-sacrifice would
have to mourn their petty limitations. With it be-
nignity was ever in exercise, and remained an active
and vital habit in the community. If the state pos-
sessed all and demanded all, then the citizens were
little better than slaves; their virtues had no freedom,
no exercise, and were bound to disappear. To get as
much as they could, to sate their appetites as fully as

34

53° Limanora

they could, was the only competition amongst neigh-
bours in such a condition of affairs. The blessedness
of giving help spontaneously would never be experi-
enced and would vanish from the community, and in
its train sympathy, beneficence, humanity.

The competition in L,irnanora was in giving, not in
getting, though getting was one of the conditions and
bases of giving. It is true that the advance of the race
had almost superseded this palpable method of reveal-
ing the bounty of the spirit. In former ages, when
hypocrisy was still possible, and language and smiles
were too cheap and ready a treasury to be wholly
trusted as evidence of kindly intent, private property
enabled a man to give a trustworthy guaranty of his
generosity; the only other things he could sacrifice,
work, liberty, life, were too personal and too limited
in opportunity to be symbols of a bounteous heart.
Now men and women needed no outer symbol to inter-
pret and pledge their thoughts and feelings. Everyone
knew the soul of his neighbour as he knew his own,
and hypocrisy was a lost art, having been long ago
stripped of its motive.

This singular people retained the institution of priv-
ate property, fearing the apathy and languor that fall
upon the energies of a socialistic people. They had
far higher stimuli to competitive vigour in the devotion
to progress and to the aim of the race, but they were not
so foolish as to abandon the more material stimuli.
Everything that would contribute to progress they re-
tained, everything that would tend to quicken the pace.
Nor were they yet so far away from the more animal
stage of their civilisation as to be wholly rid of the fear
of its return. Should it return, the other motives, even
that of patriotism, would be so shadowy as to be im-

Polity 531

potent against the deluge of appetite and indolence if
the material competitive principle, the system of private
property, had been abolished. To avoid the risk of
such a doom as had fallen on Tirralaria, they refused
to communise possessions. And a certain sweetness of
imagination, of memory, and of harmless romance had
hallowed the system in their minds; without it they
would have felt a distinct depreciation of life that would
not have found compensation in any advantage its
abolition might have brought.

The evils that seemed to attach to the system in
other times and nations attached to all other symbols
of power as well: birth, position, influence, reputation,
character, talent, opportunity, luck. All that tended
to differentiate one man from another and raise him in
the scale of the use of power was open to the same
charge as the institution of private property. But
early in their reforming career the L,imanorans had
discovered that the evils that seemed to attach to these
features of human life were not inherent in them ; they
arose from the passions of envy and jealousy. As long
as these had possession of men's hearts, the levelling
process could never be final.

Communities that made the attempt to plane down
human society to a common level, and to equalise all
symbols and opportunities of power had an infinite
task before them. They really began at the wrong end
and struck at the accidental consequences of what they
thought an evil, instead of getting to the root and
source. The L,imanorans had wisely set themselves to
bleach their natures of envy and jealousy; and once
this was accomplished they found that inequalities
amongst them were, instead of being an evil, the greatest
good, the keenest stimulus of progress. They smiled

532 Limanora

at the farce that went on in Tirralaria, a farce that at
intervals culminated in tragedy. They saw the inher-
ent futility of all efforts to do away with the occasions
of envy and jealousy, instead of eradicating the passions
themselves. They compared socialistic and equalising
schemes to bailing out the ocean with a sieve.

The disadvantages and abuses of private property
and of all inequality in the symbols of power vanish
with the opportunity and the desire to flaunt them in
the faces of neighbours and rivals, to use them as ap-
peals to envy and jealousy. As a rule it is in small
communities and circles and narrow localities, where
every man in almost every movement kicks up against
some neighbour, that envy and jealousy reach their
most virulent development and acquire the greatest re-
finement in the use of their weapons. But that is in
small communities that form parts of wider arenas of
ambition, and so learn arrogance and scorn of their
surroundings. Where a limited society lives, isolated
from alien and ambitious neighbours, a simple and un-
ambitious life, it is generally found to be almost free
from the meaner emotions, envy, jealousy, and their
counterparts, disdain, pride, and insolence. Amongst
them there is little need of coercion or law or govern-
ment; the more primitive virtues of honesty, truth,
loyalty, courage, come to them by nature; the family
eradicates or conceals all symptoms of lapse from them,
all rebellion against the interests of all. The great
drawback to such commonweals is that they are not
progressive; they remain centuries in one stage of
civilisation, and seem to travellers from larger and
advancing nations mere savages buried in filth, and
enslaved to the despotism of the seasons. But this
people considered such superficially embruted com-

Polity

533

munities nearer to ultimate salvation than the highly
refined nations that exhibit a medley of wealth and
starvation, militarism and religion. The maximum of
government, they held, implied the minimum of pro-
gress; for the essentials of spiritual advance are ignored
by external administration.

A long experience of all types of body politic, and a
minute knowledge and study of the history of the
world, had made this people antagonistic to every form
of great empire. In their own far past they had known
the ambition to incorporate other peoples, and extend
the bounds of their dominion over the world. But
that was in periods that were stagnant or retrogressive
in the essentials of a noble civilisation. Great empires
are able to concentrate vast resources; but they spend
them all on pomp, administration, and war. Wherever
the world is parcelled out into huge nations, there is
no chance of freeing them from the slavery of omnivor-
ous armaments. Each is a threat to the freedom of the
others, and none dares disarm, or spend her wealth on
the arts of peace, lest the others should take advantage
of her unwarlike attitude. The only progress continues
to be in the size and the equipment of the armies, and
in the ingenuity of the instruments of destruction.
And, should two or three absorb the others, the mili-
tary vigilance has to be all the greater. Even if the
impossible should occur, and one great empire should
absorb the world, the internal militarism would be
nonetheless; half of mankind would have to be em-
ployed in keeping the other half from rebellion against
the central power. Huge empires, instead of being
guaranties of peace, are direct incentives to war, or at
least to a permanent warlike attitude.

534 Limanora

What has most obstructed human progress on its
civilised levels is an inevitable tendency at a certain
stage to mass into large aggregates; that is, when there
has been considerable accumulation of wealth or an ex-
ceptional development of commerce, and protection is
needed by the wealthy or the merchants. Then the
military element gains the mastery of all natural power,
and whilst there occurs a rapid evolution of all forms of
aggression and defence and of all the virtues connected
with them, there is real retrogression; the spirit dwin-
dles as the outer integuments bloom. Militarism
only perpetuates itself and protects nothing but its own
ambitions. It is in its last analysis a subtle fusion of
histrionicism and savagery; it attracts the same tastes
as the prize-iing and the theatre. Everything that
encourages it or develops it stands in the way of the
true advance of the human race.

There is, they held, no hope for mankind in general,
unless this stage of imperial ambitions and aggrega-
tions can be overleaped. Back must the world recede
from vast empires if it would attain to any nobleness
of aim, or any development of the higher elements in
man. Its sole salvation lies in small communities
covering its surface and remaining free from the taint
of imperial effort and militarism. Only when the
nation has complete command of the numbers within it
through the family, that is, when the nation is small,
will patriotism become commensurate with humanity,
and the true goal of the human race be the aim of the
individual.

The family is the natural unit of administration in a
community; and, as long as the heads form the com-
mon council that watches the interests and aim of all,
it can never come into conflict with national unity and

Polity

535

progress. The house and its goods belonged to the
household in Umanora; and, although the members
of it had equal rights to the livelihood that was counted
fullest and best by the community, the individual, if
mature, had freedom of action that would surprise a
Western freeman; he was the equal of all members of
the state; within the aim of the race and the path of its
progress he had complete personal initiative; his de-
stiny, it is true, had been shaped for him during his
pupillage, but the fulfilment of it was his own; his
aims and desires had been implanted and developed
and pruned whilst he was passing through childhood
and youth, so that he would not in full manhood
spontaneously change them, but when he became an
independent citizen his methods of fulfilling these were
all his own. He had to contribute to the family treas-
ury what was needed to keep it level with Limanoran
affluence, and he was generally eager to give more; but
all the rest was at his own disposal. The family had
many buildings in common; but each full-grown mem-
ber, whether male or female, had a separate house to
retire to. Originality in the family, one of the chief
methods in the race for encouraging progress, could
never be attained without cultivating originality in the
individual. It had a track laid out for it through the
future, carefully related to the march of the nation ; but
it might adopt what means it liked to make that track
sure, and it might explore on all sides of it for new
ideas and methods and resources. It was the same
with the individual within it; he was encouraged to
find his own means, and to use his imagination and his
other faculties fully and independently, provided he
kept his eye on the goal of the family, which was in-
volved in the goal of the race.

536 Limanora

All the families were equal in their relations to the
state, whatever their occupation or wealth or origin
might be. This prevented the family from passing into
the rigidity of the caste. All work was alike honoured,
and personal worth was the test of the man and of the
respect paid him, irrespective of external symbols and
representatives of power. And to prevent the super-
session of this by any other principle, all the physical
forms of toil that might at one time or other be con-
sidered offensive, were gathered into the hands of the
state, and all men and women had to take their share
of them. They were the duties connected with the
various public institutions, and especially with the
centre of force. It was recognised as a good thing that
every man and woman should have physical exercise
every day in order to keep the basis of the spirit in the
best possible condition, by working off the debris of
the various organs and functions of the system. This
fitted in with the principle that all force should concen-
trate in the hands of the government. The most severe
physical toil was certain to be that which collected,
divided, and adapted the vast accumulation of energy
in Rimla. The duties in the centre of force were there-
fore portioned out day by day and week by week; and
every man and woman of the community had to spend
a certain portion of time each day in this vast forge of
energy. But the lighter work was given to the less
muscular, and the youthful had to bear the chief bur-
den; whilst the older, as their share, were occupied
chiefly in superintending it. Besides this, every citizen
had to take daily part in the work of some one of the
public institutions that were not assigned to special
families, or in the mechanical and unskilled toil of one
of those that were under the care of special families.

Polity

537

Thus two or three hours of every citizen's twenty-four
were impounded by the state, much to his bodily and
spiritual advantage.

The only contribution in money or kind that the
state made compulsory was that which each family
exchequer gave for the support of the medical, archi-
tectural, and other public professional families. No
valid system could have estimated the value of their
services either to the state or to the individual; and it
was considered impracticable to valuate the benefits
received by each family from their work. An amount
was fixed, which each had to contribute to every family
that had the care of a public institution, or the per-
formance of a public duty. But over and above this
amount the voluntary gifts to them were very large.
The result was that the treasuries of public and profes-
sional families were oftenest the fullest; and they were
as ready and as able to give as any. If there was any
rivalry amongst the families and individuals in L,ima-
nora, it was in the delight of giving.

CHAPTER X

THE MANORA AND THE IMANORA

WHAT would have been considered taxes in
another state were looked on by the people
of this land as voluntary contributions. There had
been no formal resolution or written law fixing neces-
sary imposts, but they came rather from the heart of
the people, and expressed themselves in what would
have been called in other nations public opinion. It
was opinion which needed no verbal communication
and might be called rather the public magnetism of the
race, that unified its customs and feelings, anc} made a
body of written law superfluous.

One feature of their civilisation that puzzled me for
many years was the seeming immobility of their public
relationships. When a man or woman got into a certain
family with its professional duties and prospects, there
was no means, it seemed to me, of changing. Once in
a certain groove, a Limanoran was in it for ever. His
destiny was irrevocable. It is true that the elders took
every precaution to choose his parents and ancestry for
such a goal, and to mould his tissues and educate his
faculties to it. Yet some inspiration might reveal to
him a vista into a future better suited to his powers
than that which had been fixed for him. It is true

538

The Manora and the Imanora 539

that this feature gave great stability and strength to
the state. But a people that believed so firmly in
liberty, originality, and progress should surely have
adopted some more plastic system for their permanent
relationships, some status less rigid and immutable for
the individual members. It seemed to me more like
the iron system of caste than the flexibility of an ad-
vancing civilisation.

As usual I was mistaken in my criticism. I had not
looked deeply enough, or observed long enough to
know the marvellous fabric of their polity, a full know-
ledge of which meant an experience of several centuries.
The immutability was only in appearance and not in
reality.

A few years after I had been admitted to some of the
privileges of mature citizenship, I began to feel that
we were approaching an exceptional time. There was
evident a bustle of preparation, a rare quickening of
the pace of all work, and an expectancy that pointed
to some unusual event. The flight-exercises and the
leisure-time were somewhat curtailed, and as much
work was put into four weeks as was commonly put
into five. Before the year was half over, I began to
understand what it meant. The word Manora occurred
too often on the lips and in the minds of my neighbours
and friends to escape my observation and on inquiry I
found it meant the decennial review. Every ten years,
one quarter of the year was devoted to a census of the
civilisation of the period.

With all the other newly matured citizens, I had to
be instructed in the part I was to take in this census.
Kach day for months I had to devote some hours to
tracing out the progress I had made both in character
and in works, and in putting it into graphic and easily

540 Limanora

observed form. I was taught to draw up comparative
statistics of the stages I had passed through from year
to year for the decennial period, though they considered
this a poor and misleading mode of reviewing the past.
It was the mere skeleton of the census.

I was supplied from the valley of memory with
irelium-strips, whereon had been recorded automatic-
ally without my knowledge my thoughts and feelings
and words in the various important scenes in which I
had taken part. How surprised was I often to observe
the mistakes my memory had fallen into ! As a witness
of some act I had seen, or some discussion I had heard,
I would have sworn confidently to the opposite of the
truth. As to my own deeds and words and even
thoughts and feelings, I was ashamed to see how com-
pletely my subsequent life had distorted the record of
them; the likeness was often unrecognisable. And I
knew well which was wrong; for the machine-reporters
were infallible as far as their report went. After my
perusal of these automatic records of my life I came to
the conclusion that common history must be a tissue of
fiction and error wherever it has had to depend on the
senses and memory of men for its details. I grew less
and less inclined to add anything from memory to my
decennial biography, which I drew from these machine-
reports. It was as refreshing to study them as if I had
been examining pictures and memorials of another's
life. By the time I had done with them, I seemed to
know something real of my past; and side by side I
was able to place my review of what I had become, and
the account of my various stages of growth during this
period, with the definiteness and accuracy of one who
was analysing scientifically half a dozen different evo-
lutionary specimens of a species. My personality stood

The Manora and the Imanora 541

out at each different point of its growth as clearly as if
it had been that of another man laid under the micro-
scope and in these records I lived my life over again.

But I was still further aided in these researches into
my development by the accounts of the weekly inspec-
tion of my tissues and faculties kept by the medical fam-
ilies. These were not merely statistical and verbal, but
pictorial. The appearance and electric state of every
part of my system had been made to impress them-
selves indelibly in picture-records; and these were
now submitted to me for comparison. From the dif-
ferent records set side by side with the electrographs
and radiographs of all my animal economy, I was
taught how to produce an evolutionary picture of my
faculties and organs and tissues.

This was one of the most striking advances in their
art. They could combine the pictorial representations
of various stages in the life of a growing being in such
a way that, when placed in one of their lightning-swift
representers, the growth would flash before one's senses
as a continuity. A child would grow as by magic into
a matured man or woman as we gazed. A seed would
grow into a great tree in the space of a few minutes.
The brain or heart or lungs of a I^imanoran would pass
like a flash through the stages of development that had
taken generations to achieve. For spectacular study
of the history of any living thing nothing could surpass
the imataran, or focusser of history, as the new instru-
ment was called.

From the archives of the medical family I was able
to make such a series of pictures of my whole constitu-
tion and system as revealed the growth of every faculty
and organ and tissue. The rapidity of my develop-
ment astounded me as I looked over these graphic

542 Limanora

records of my past. It was like a full-grown man
inspecting the photographs and annals of his infancy
and childhood. I could not have believed the story of
it, had it not been engraved so indubitably on these
irelitim-strips by the machine- reporters. My own
memory had become so foreshortened by the conscious-
ness of my present, and by the disproportionate im-
portance of recent events and conditions that I could
have no more implicit trust in its representations of
the past. But, when I placed the various series of
evolutionary pictures in the imataran, the effect was so
magical that I was half-inclined to believe in preference
my backward-looking faculty again. In the twinkling
of an eye the transparent reflection of myself had grown
its ten years' growth, and I had developed out of an
alien into something not unlike a lyimanoran.

All that I had done in the period, or rather all that
I had done productively, I had similarly to picturise in
series, so that every feature that had been in any way
developed might reveal itself, and everything that
showed stagnation or retrogression might be observed
without trouble.

My proparents and the elders of the family superin-
tended and tested my review of my past, and taught
me to be unbending in criticism of myself. No feature
that seemed to count against my advance was I to
shrink from representing in all its nakedness, nor was I
through false modesty to depreciate whatsoever stood
to my credit. I scarcely needed the precautions; for I
had learned during my sojourn amongst this rigidly
sincere and ingenuous people to respect the naked
truth above all things. Indeed I had come to feel that
it was useless to act otherwise than as if my whole
system were open to the gaze of my neighbours.

The Manora and the Imanora 543

Every mature member of the community had this
drastic valuation of his work and strict criticism of
himself to make and all were occupied for three months
in reducing the annals of their past ten years to focus.
For the young and those still under tutelage the
proparents and guardians were responsible, and they
picturised for the imataran the decennial life of their
pupils as well as of themselves.

But over and above this personal work, the elders
had to review the growth of the families, institutions,
sciences, and arts of which they had the guidance.
This they knew well how to do from long practice, and
had carefully prepared the records of each separate year
of the decennium, and the pictures of the new features
and new growths in the departments they superin-
tended. During these three months all they had to do
was to focus the growth of the years and arrange the
various records in series in such a way as to reveal the
development.

When all was ready, each family gathered in its
public spectacular hall and viewed the growth of every
member of it in the shadows thrown by the imataran.
I thought at first that the effect would be too mono-
tonous to be interesting. But, as the spectacle of the
L,eomo proceeded, it proved to be a marvellous revela-
tion of the vast variety of types in one family, and of
the amount of growth that had gone on in the tissues
and faculties of every member in different directions.

The growth of the family as a whole was taken first,
— its power of coping with new problems and of suggest-
ing difficulties to come, its additions to the treasury of
force and to the civilisation of the race, its attitude
toward the aim of the nation, its pace on the forward
march, its comprehension of the L,imanoran ethics and

544 Limanora

of the general problems of the race, its command over
its individual members, and its relationships to the
other families and to the state as a whole. The decen-
nial development of the Leomo was graphically focussed
in pictures that told their story in a flash even to the
least mature.

Massed thus, the advance was felt by all to be sur-
prising, for each had been watching throughout the
decennium his own special work or set of faculties, and
had been unable to abstract himself sufficiently from
his own sphere to gain a just view of the whole family
progress. As we saw the science and the art develop
before our eyes, the moment's glance intensified the
ten years' work into a marvel. From a hundred dif-
ferent points of view we watched the advance of the
l>omo, and we felt proud that we belonged to such a
family; we knew that taken as a whole it had not been
wanting in its duty to the race and the aim of the race.
A magnetic thrill went through us, especially when
there unrolled before us the living picture of the pre-
ceding decennium; the contrast between the two in
pace of development was striking. Here and there of
course we recognised flaws in the work accomplished
during our recent period, when seen against the design
of the whole. But we gathered from the spectacle fresh
hope and energy for the future, and renewed determ-
ination to increase the pace still more during the next
period.

We shrank a little perhaps from the next stage of
the spectacle, for it meant the decennial confession of
every one of us all. The family as a whole acted the
priest, and before it we each laid the story of our fail-
ures and successes, our deeds of virtue and our sins.
The ordeal was less trying than I had anticipated, for

The Manora and the Imanora 545

the critic was lenient and sympathetic. If the lapse
was slight, the source of it was tenderly pointed out by
the elders and the remedy indicated; and the stronger
members formed resolves to lend their strength to the
lapser to master his weakness; everything that was
possible, he felt sure, would be done to help the lag-
gard faculty or tissue to recoup its powers and bring
itself even with the march of the family. If the lapse
was great, the case was sympathetically placed before
the council of elders, which investigated the question
whether it was due to their mistaken choice of a career
for the youth (it was generally a youth that failed
strikingly), or whether it had come from some changed
faculty or tissue in him; if it were the former, he was
aided in deciding what change in his career would
be best for him; if the latter, he was dealt with as an
invalid, and in the hospital for spiritual diseases the
curative powers of the nation were applied to his case.
Sometimes his disease originated in atavism, and then
the most drastic remedies, both physical and spiritual,
were brought to bear; sometimes it was found to come
from a new microscopic parasite that had floated from
some far atmosphere into the Limanoran arena; and
then all the wisdom and science of the race had to be
brought into requisition to investigate the conditions
of the new foe and the possible means of driving it out.
This indeed was the time for anyone who had made
a mistake to retrace his steps. Here it was that the
seeming rigidity of the system was tempered and ren-
dered flexible and plastic as nature herself. Ten years
was but a point in the continuity of the force in a man,
in the great expansion of I^imanoran life. But it was
enough to make sure that a mistake in the choice of a
career was real, not merely apparent, and that the

35

546 Limanora

longing for another was not a mere caprice. A shorter
period would not have been test enough ; and the re-
view of all careers prevented undue proportion being
given to any individual failure or mistake. It was not
infrequent for youths who thought that they had mis-
taken their career, to change their minds at the Manora,
and acknowledge that, all things considered, the wisest
course had been chosen for them; they came to see that
their work was not so defective as they had imagined,
and that they had contributed their due quota to the
advance of the family and the race; against the back-
ground of the whole science or art in which they toiled,
they recovered tone and hope, and the pride they felt
in the progress of all stirred them to new exertions in
their own special work. It was as much the aim of the
elders in these Manoras to give new enthusiasm in the
careers that had been chosen as to revise the scheme
of careers. The primary aim was to remove the sense
of bondage that might grow up in the breasts of any
from the feeling of inevitableness and unchangeableness
in the development of their lives. It was rare indeed
that a real failure ever occurred. But none the less a
sense of failure might seize upon a timid or self-depre-
ciative mind, and then the knowledge that there could
be no turning back would send it rankling home into
the soul. Circumscription to a course, if irrevocable,
is none the less incarceration that it is a course selected
by ourselves. A Limanoran never felt enslaved to his
career. He knew he had made his choice, and that he
might make it again if he showed sufficient reason.
The result of this atmosphere of complete freedom was
that not once in a generation was any career, once
deliberately selected, changed. The elders were fully
justified in the elaborate choice of ancestry and parents,

The Manora and the Imanora 547

and in the still more elaborate pains taken in the choice
of surroundings and in training. Misgivings and hesi-
tations all disappeared in the full light of the decennial
review.

It was marvellous how the magnetic sympathy of the
family, as the spectacular confessional spread life after
life before the gaze of all, eradicated timidities, and
strengthened each member in the path he had chosen.
Instead of having his little defects emphasised or exag-
gerated, all the merits of his work were brought out.
I took new courage and hope, as I felt the air of im-
partial esteem over the excellencies of each member's
development and of sympathetic sorrow and condolence
over any evidence of failure or retrogression. Not a
sign was there of censorious or captious criticism. Nor
was there anything of that barter of laudation and
panegyric which makes mutual-admiration societies so
unwholesome in their effects. All was subdued, gentle,
reasonable, wise, and sympathetic, and the most health-
ful and invigorating of all tonics to everyone. From
what I had looked forward to as an ordeal I came away
refreshed and strong, determined to amend everything
that could be deemed faulty in my life, and to quicken
my pace in marching towards the goal of the race.

The national review of every family's progress was
somewhat similar, except that the larger arena and the
greater volume of magnetism in the audience stirred a
deeper thrill in the natures of the individual members.
It was held in Loomiefa, and it took many days to
view the whole spectacle of the nation's decennial work.
Nothing have I ever seen so varied, disciplinal, and
impressive. It was as if ten thousand years of the
whole world's progress had been focussed in this val-
ley. Science after science, art after art, graphically

54$ Limanora

displayed all that it had achieved during the period.
To me it seemed a universal education; and it strained
all my faculties to follow the marvellous array of in-
ventions and discoveries, whilst my neighbours and
comrades drank the whole spectacle in with an ease
that in other circumstances would have made me envi-
ous. It was not the fault of the masters and makers
of the display that I followed it with difficulty, for they
had made every feature clear even to the least mature.
What puzzled me was the logical sequence or interde-
pendence of the various parts of the spectacle. Every-
thing had been worked out so as to reveal its relationship
to the whole system and to the aim of the race, and to
comprehend it tested all my powers. I felt as if I had
to study a great encyclopaedia in a few days, or rather
its pictorial representation of every feature of the most
advanced and intricate civilisation. But even this
analogy is inadequate, for the phases of the many-sided
progress were not mechanically arranged, but grew out
of the central system by a natural and rational magic.
The work of every family revealed its central principles
and their connection with the advance of the race. It
looked as if some master-mind had. sat through the
years, and watching the nation's work as it was being
accomplished, kept it all in system. We felt that there
was one design in the progress of the whole period,
and that any feature that stood out in independence
marred the symmetry, and needed correction.

I remembered the waste of energy that took place in
all intellectual spheres in Europe, and felt ashamed of
the contrast. I could have told this people of the futile
skirmishings and endless controversies of the men of
science and learning, of their duplications of each
other's work with the consequent clutchings after

The Manora and the Imanora 549

fame, of their assumptions and merely verbal distinc-
tions, of their thickets of abstruse definitions and am-
biguities, of their everlasting substitutions of theory
for fact. I never felt so conscious of the shortcom-
ings of the civilisation which had nurtured me as
during the array of Limanoran decennial progress in
sciences and arts.

After the spectacle was over, we returned to our
usual employments. But I observed that there were
now more frequent meetings of the elders for several
months, and at last we had as the result of their discus-
sion of the review and its aspects a considerable re-
arrangement of our work, and of our positions in the
family and in the state. Most proceeded on the path
they had been taking during the previous period. But
many found themselves now at work more congenial to
their temperaments and destinies, and were able to put
into it their whole energy rid of the friction that the
artificial application of will had meant. The changes
occurred almost naturally and spontaneously; each
elder returned to his family from the final meeting of
the senate over the Manora, and it was known without
effort or command or waste of time who had to modify
his position and work, and how the modification was to
be accomplished.

The impetus given to the civilisation by this loosen-
ing of any bonds which had been begun to be felt sent
it on with exhilaration and vigour for years. There
was an air of buoyant freedom and alacrity, even of
mirth amongst the younger, as they spent their best
skill and capacity upon the work they had in hand.
The pace perceptibly quickened, and at times the nation
seemed to advance with the volume and swiftness of a
torrent. Discovery and invention became fuller as well

55° Limanora

as more minute, and the outlook began to take in
regions of which they had not thought before.

I soon came to know that there was a more compre-
hensive and far-reaching evaluation of the resources,
the faculty, and the personnel of the race ahead of us.
Every tenth decennium there occurred the event of the
century, the Imanora or prospicient review. Ten years
made too short a period to give a bird's-eye view of
the future as contrasted with the past. Even a century
was short enough for the perspective of past and future
progress; but it was considered wise to make the period
fixed and of regular recurrence, and ten decenniums
formed a space symmetrical with the shorter Manora.
The Imanora was thus a centennial review. Tenden-
cies that might be ambiguous in their character under
a decennial criticism would proclaim themselves evil or
good in so long a stretch as a hundred years. Facul-
ties that would still be but in embryo after a course
often years would be in full maturity when a century
had passed. Young men and women, who might still
hesitate within a decade as to whether they had chosen
their best career, would have found by the Imanora
what was their true bent beyond the possibility of
mistake.

But it was not meant merely as a review of the past
and a rearrangement of positions, as the Manora was
above all things. It was rather a revision of aims and
destinies, a futuritive evaluation of the powers of the
race. Not merely the elders but the whole people
were led up to a mount of vision whence they could
see their future for hundreds of years spread out before
them, bounded by the lines their past had drawn.
There they could view in picture the solutions of the
problems they had been working at and the final out-

The Manora and the Imanora 55 l

come of the lines of development they had been fol-
lowing. They had to decide there and then how far
these agreed with the ultimate aim and destiny of
the race, and how far they had better modify them,
or modify the general aim. Then they had to choose
whether their path should turn to the right or left,
or should continue onwards as it had continued for
a century. The spectacle of their future spread out in
living picture and symbol must have been a deeply im-
pressive sight. Every family had prepared a series of
tableaux of their possible destinies and the possible de-
velopments of their sciences and arts, of the problems
they would have to solve, and of their possible solu-
tions, and these were passed in detail before the whole
people for criticism and appreciation. It was as if a
nation were led to the cave of some great and true
prophet, and were shown all that lay before it, whatso-
ever path it should choose. The Limanorans had be-
fore them the choice of a destiny for a hundred years.
It was the care of the elders that no ambiguity or dis-
proportion should be admitted into the map of the pos-
sible routes that they might take through the future,
and that there should be no obscurity in the relation-
ships of these to the ultimate goal.

During the last decade of the century the Loomiamo
and the Fraloomiamo were the busiest of all the families
in the island. Their exceptional development of im-
agination made them essential to the preparation of
every map of the future. They seemed to be able to
see where others found only night and darkness. Each
science and art often awoke to perceive its way barred
by some hill of difficulty, round or over which they
could discover no way; then the members of the
Loomiamo who had made special study of its path

552 Limanora

were called in to point out the possible tracks that
might lead past the obstacle. Or again a family would
find the way of its science or art untraceable; they
would grope blindly about for it and yet see no farther
than the facts and methods immediately before them.
Here the help of the Fraloomiamo was indispensable;
a thousand different way-marks would soon be ap-
parent, and the route of future development would
grow plain.

The pioneering families were the heroes of the Ima-
nora, although most of the hard work belonged to those
who watched over the individual sciences and arts.
Nothing could be done without them, and the exhila-
ration of trust in them and need of their services gave
extraordinary vigour to their special faculty. The
close of a century was one of the great autumns of their
literature; their harvests at that era were marked by
fulness and wealth, and the pace of their work gave it
exceptional fervour and glow. In the West we should
have called the passionate ardour with which they
threw off scheme after scheme, inspiration of the high-
est order. But they knew the working of their faculty
as well as any of the inventors knew the intricacies of
their machines. There was nothing mysterious about
it. Their clear knowledge of its constitution and of the
conditions that favoured its growth made it easy for
them to predict when its pace and volume would be
torrential, and every preparation was made by the
pioneering families to meet the exceptional drain on
their energies at the close of every century.

Loomiefa was then the scene of the most striking pre-
figurant displays that the human mind could conceive.
The resources of Limanoran skill and ingenuity were
brought to bear on it, and nothing was left undone to

The Manora and the Imanora 553

impress the event upon the imaginations and memories
of the younger, for the elders expected that it would
thus mould the natures of the coming generation
through the minds of the prospective parents. The
world as it might be, if certain lines of development
were followed, was pictured in the most impressive way
possible; and to this people, it seemed to me,' every-
thing was possible. The Imanora had the sublimity
and transcendent consecration of a great religious de-
parture, whose significance was fully foreseen.

CHAPTER XI

KTHICS

[AFTERWARDS found that Imanora necessarily
differed from Imanora as widely as age from age or
man from man, it being as it was the universal outlook
of so progressive a people. What one centennial
mount of vision foresaw as a possibility the next viewed
as an accomplished fact. What one century peered
into the darkness to descry, another brought into the
daylight of achievement, and a third antiquated.

But there were other and wider differences than this
I have stated. Though all phases of the civilisation
were reviewed in relation to the future, generally one
phase took prominence and gave character to each
Imanora. In the earlier periods, after the purgations,
the physiological and biological sciences and arts pre-
dominated; for the elders were most anxious then to
bring the physical basis of their life up to the level of
quickening progress. Then came the periods specially
devoted to advance in chemistry and physics and the
other sciences and arts that gave them new power over
the outside world. One century was the great as-
tronomical period, when the imagination of the race
stretched out with yearning to other stars. Another
was the great inventive era, when it seemed as easy as

554

Ethics 555

a dream to make new machines which should open out
wide prospects of additional conquest over nature and
humanity.

In the more recent centuries ethics had again come
to the front, new points of view having been shown by
the great discoveries and inventions of many centuries.
The first Imanora after the series of purgations was
complete had been predominantly ethical. The race
had bent its attention so exclusively upon the crimes
and vices which had hindered their advance for ages,
that they could think of almost no other development
than the ethical. The elders had been investigating
for years little else than the defects in the moral nature,
their bases in the physical system, and the methods of
remedying them. They had come to the conclusion
after all their researches that nothing could be done
for the cure of the minor vices till the most vicious and
defective characters had been cleared out. A systematic
purification of the commonweal must precede attempts
at moral reform. Most of the purgations were managed
by wise and cautious diplomacy; the bait of more than
their share of the wealth of the island in portable form,
and the chance of a new country in which to indulge
their vice to license, induced them to ship off to a dis-
tance. Only a few needed forcible measures to make
them remove. The lying and hypocritical, the licen-
tious, the envious and jealous, the boastful and the
epicurean, the religiously intolerant and superstitious,
readily seized the opportunity of seeking a country
where they might make their own laws and shape their
customs to suit their special weakness. The warlike
and murderous and the thievish and socialistic thought
they could force a still better bargain; they had strong
inner doubts whether they would be likely to have as

556 Limanora

fine an arena for their talents in a new country, and
whether they would make the best companions for one
another. An increase of the inducement had little
effect on them; they felt that their special vices would
lose half their attraction when removed from the pre-
sence of the contrasted and shrinking virtues. Much
of the pleasure of a murder or a theft lay in the neces-
sity for its concealment, and the ingenuity required to
evade punishment. The occupations ceased to be fine
arts as soon as they became the occupations of the
whole community. To these criminal sections of the
race force had to be applied before they left the island;
it had to be a policy of deportation.

It was little wonder that for a century after absorp-
tion in such work the civilisation of Limanora was es-
sentially ethical. To rid themselves of every trace of
the detestable vices of which they had just seen the
worst specimens deported over the horizon, became
the one aim and ideal of the now-expurgated people.
Development seemed nothing more than greater ease
and habitualness in the virtues. To be purer, truer,
more tolerant, more generous, more gentle and modest
and loving, was their one idea of progress. The out-
look from the first Imanora was towards an ideal of
such benignity and kindliness as would make all per-
sonal relations easy and happy beyond the conception
of other nations.

The first few decades of the next century gave them
exhilaration in the pursuit of this aim. They took the
greatest delight in eradicating the seedling ferocities of
their savage past. Spite, rancour, disdain, pitilessness,
vanity, surliness, ingratitude, partiality, want of can-
dour, acerbity, meanness, and all uncharitableness were
rigorously checked, and every thought or energy that

Ethics 557

might, when abused, tend in these directions was
finally mastered. It was a delight to help one another
in the crusade against these petty defects. Nothing
seemed so noble or progressive as to spend every leisure
moment on cultivating the generous attitude towards
one another.

But they soon saw the limits of such a progress.
The virtues became easy and common to all and it
grew difficult to find new ethical worlds to conquer.
Most of them indulged too eagerly in introspection
and some turned morbidly self-critical, finding defects
where there were none. Imagination became a factory
of petty faults and vices. The result was new and real
faults, which threatened to maim their civilisation and
bar their further progress. They were painfully self-
conscious, fearing lest the eyes of a neighbour or com-
rade should discover in them germs of moral disease
which had escaped their own microscopic criticism.
They shrank from beginning any enterprise; they
feared to come to decisions or make resolves, lest they
should be wrong. They tolerated and even encouraged
faults and defects in their friends which they would
have drastically eradicated from their own natures; they
nursed in pity and generosity weak characters and dis-
eased systems into length of life, and shrank from for-
bidding them parenthood and posterity. They strained
at gnats and swallowed camels and indulged in constant
casuistry. In short, the whole race fell into a chronic
spiritual invalidisrn and many of them were afflicted
with moral hypochondria. They felt the pulses of
their souls daily and hourly, and were ever haunted
with the fear of the old vices returning on them, so
losing their masculine grit and self-command. Fin-
ally they threatened to become a race of sinewless

558 Limanora

effeminates with nothing but spiritual collapse and
palsy before them.

It was clear that this microscopic introspection and
moral unrest must cease, if there was to be any real
advance. They had already recognised that ethics de-
veloped by stages, and that any attempt on the part of
a race to force it beyond the intellectual point of view
which they had reached only ended in temporary fail-
ure and retrogression. No new moral outlook can be
attained unless reason has ascended a higher mount
of vision. Revelation can never come without new
achievement. A fixed quantity of ethical knowledge
in a nation is moral death, and to systematise ethical
maxims into an absolute code for all time is to enslave
the reason of the world. For what is the almost un-
attainable ideal of one stage of racial development is
the antiquated truism of a later stage. Savage man
compares ill in polity and moral code with the repub-
lics of the bee and the ant, just as his engineering
and architectural skill are infantile beside those of the
beaver. How unprotective and even cruel he is to his
aged and women and children, compared with many
animals! How unadvanced even the most civilised are
in truth and loyalty compared with the dog! How
weak in the reasoning that is based on the reports of
the senses are men in general compared with the wild
animals! There is evidently an infinite variety of
stages in the ethical and intellectual development and
vision of man, as there is in those of the animals. The
most advanced human beings, just like the least ad-
vanced, are, in some points, lower than the beasts.
But man can, if he will, have mastery of his circum-
stances and conditions, inasmuch as he can examine
himself by reflection, and tends to examine himself

Ethics 559

through self-consciousness. The power and tendency,
however, are only fitfully taken advantage of, and it
is therefore at long intervals that even the best races
accelerate the pace of their progress beyond that which
nature herself indicates.

The elders, and through them the people, were per-
suaded that this absorbing pursuit of ethical improve-
ment must be abandoned. The development of the
physical system was the first distraction that they
thought of; and their bodies grew in muscular power,
in grace of form, and in litheness of movement. It
was during this athletic period that flight through the
air was achieved; then, too, physiology and medicine
grew into real sciences and began to direct the evolu-
tion of physical man, and the struggle against the
hosts of microscopic parasites that over-populate the
elements and have to seek pastures in the human body.
It was in this era, too, that they mastered the secret of
prolonging life and began the series of experiments in
food and other forms of sustenance, and in heredity,
which ended in giving them centuries instead of decades
to live.

It soon came to be noticed, however, that a new but
analogous hypochondria began to seize even the youth-
ful athletes of the race. There was too much direct
attention paid to the state and development of the body
to be wholesome. Athletic egotism became rampant,
and as a result of it a scorn of intellectual pursuits. It
was as truly a diseased state of the human system as
the moral invalidism with which they had been afflicted
in the previous era. Thews and sinews were measured
and examined with scientific minuteness. Muscular
development was appraised and applauded as moral
qualities had formerly been. The spirit began to be

560 Limanora

impoverished; the brain decreased in weight and fine-
ness of convolution. Athletic introspection was coming
to be as painful and masterful a disease as moral intro-
spection had been. Diet and exercise became the ab-
sorbing topics of daily conversation and nothing was
invented but machines for training the body. Most
palpable of all the consequences was the growth of ar-
rogant gait and rough manners, and this was the first
symptom to call attention to the new malady. It be-
came clear to the elders that the worst form of atavism,
return to the savagery that is just above animalism,
was about to reappear, and with it would come weak-
ened heart and lungs and disordered digestion; for the
new training overstrained all the organs, and threw
them into disrepair.

The conclusions drawn from these two experiences
were that variety of occupation was one of the first es-
sentials of mental and bodily health, and that absorp-
tion in the improvement of any part or section of the
human system induced disease both of mind and body;
morality and health are better cultivated as indirect
aims of individual existence; they defeat their own
ends when they become egoistic or introspective. In
order to remedy the evils which were threatening the
life of the state, its framework was completely re-
formed. To every family and individual was assigned
an external work that would draw the thoughts away
from self for the greater part of the twenty-four hours;
every mature member of the community was expected
to achieve something unconnected with himself every
day. Kxercise merely for amusement was cut down to
a minimum, and in order to keep the body in full
vigour, the centre of force was organised, where every
man and woman had to do so much useful physical

Ethics 561

work in the round of the clock. The care of the health,
both mental and bodily, was handed over to the medi-
cal elders, who were, first of all, the healthiest and
healthiest-minded of the older men of the nation.
Watching for symptoms of disease in one's system,
whether moral or corporeal', fell into oblivion, and the
great era of external achievement began. Specialisa-
tion of work was its chief principle and the source of
its success, but no one was allowed to fall into excessive
specialism, such as would atrophy all but one set of
faculties and energies. No part of the body or mind
was left without daily or weekly exercise. The elders
mapped out the various types of intellectual and phy-
sical work from which a man or woman might select to
fill leisure time. Everyone had a large choice within
a limited number of kinds of work, generally kinds of
work which were dissimilar to his special employment.
If it were left to a man to choose his own type of dis-
tractions, he might select that which would feed high
the sides of his nature he most used, and atrophy those
that most needed development; for ease of application
is an important factor in his choice of exercise and
amusement, and might become too dominant.

It was not in order to assimilate the bases of the na-
tures of the community that this limitation of leisure
employments was adopted. On the contrary, one of
the subordinate aims of the elders was to introduce as
great a variety as possible into the talents, faculties,
and tendencies of the race. Equality, and still more
similarity, of members of a community, they well knew
from the laws of nature meant stagnation if not com-
plete national death. Throughout the cosmos it was
the unequal degree to which various bodies and exist-
36

562 Limanora

ences shared in different types of energy that produced
the unstable equilibrium we call life. The disparate
masses of the planets induced those currents of influ-
ence we call gravitation, one of the greatest sources
of power in our world. The differences in temperature
between the sun and the planets make it of such vast
importance as a source of heat and energy to them, and
it is the difference of two bodies as to electric state that
induces currents of electricity between them. As soon
as there is equilibrium of all the atoms or bodies or ex-
istences within a certain sphere of influence there
ceases to be movement in it and death supervenes; and
if all bodies and existences in the cosmos had an equal
and similar share of all its elements and forces, it
would be dead. The Deity himself, the sum and source
of all life, must, as an eternal existence, have unend-
ing variety.

The law of the universe is the law of the political
and moral world. There can be no life where there is
complete stable equilibrium, that is, where every mem-
ber of a community is exactly similar to every other
member in privileges. Currents of influence cease.
Impetus and motive vanish. Desire and yearning and
love disappear with passion and ambition. The social-
istic ideal is social and political death.

The everlasting flow of influence or power from
point to point is the essential condition of vigorous
existence in a community or race, therefore one of the
chief subsidiary aims of the directors of lyimanora was
the creation of variety and inequality of nature and
position. This made them adopt the family as the unit
in the state, for in the family there would be shelter for
any new individual talent, and heredity would cherish
and increase it as it handed it on. In the Western

Ethics 563

states the influence of the family over its children
ceases not long after boyhood or girlhood, and the
world soon puts them into the same moulds as its
favourite men and women; individuality and original-
ity in most are planed down by the recognised conven-
tions-. A longer continuance of family life and influence
would secure and strengthen any new variations in a
talent or tendency, till the character was strong enough
to stand by them as its own and defend them against
the criticism of aliens and strangers. Diversity in
unity was the ideal of family life in L,imanora. The
elders of a family watched with eagerness for any
modification of the special faculties or powers, and
nursed it with the most anxious care, if they decided
that it would assist the advance of the race, and the
medical elders were ever suggesting the proper cross
for producing a new variety of the old talents. In-
deed, one of the most responsible duties of the council
of elders was to decide as to the matings and parent-
hoods of the community; in this lay, they felt, the
guidance of their destiny, the real germ of the future.
Thus and thus alone were they able to keep up that
divergence of new species which would ensure an ever-
quickening flow of life in the race.

They had cut off by their policy of complete isola-
tion most of the stimulus that comes from alien rivalry.
Such rivalry, they thought, would be worse than none;
for it would at last drive them to adopt the means and
weapons of their rivals, which they considered wholly
retrograde and evil. It would be not unlike a compe-
tition between man and the wild beasts. Any kind of
communication with those who were below them in
civilisation and deliberately unprogressive, was certain
to taint and drag down, and the strong consciousness

564 Limanora

of this fact checked the natural tendency of such be-
nignity as theirs towards missionaryism.

At the same time they knew well that no people
would ever advance without competition and the strug-
gle that ensues on competition. They greatly encour-
aged variation and inequality within their state, but
were certain that this was not enough. There must
be the knowledge, if not the immediate presence, of
another type of being, similar to their own yet higher
in some features, in order to stimulate advance. To
get this was the object of their system of couriers into
space, both mechanic and human. They were never
weary of gathering in all possible indications of higher
intelligences in extra-terrestrial elements and regions.
For a long period they had been satisfied with the re-
ports of their idrovamolans, and other recorders of
events which occurred on the earth, out of reach of
their unaided senses. But it gradually pressed itself
home upon them that the comedy of terrestrial exist-
ence gave no stimulus to progress; it stirred their
laughter, or scorn, or indignation, or disgust too often
to edify. Rare, indeed, was it to witness a deed or
phase of civilisation that gave them a new model, or
inspired them to higher life. It was, as a rule, de-
grading to watch beings in their own shape waste their
noble faculties on the cruelties of war, the meannesses
of commerce and industrialism, the pettinesses of social
intercourse, and the gross deceits and pretences of
politics, diplomacy, and public life.

Year by year the racial energy was drawn off from
the spectacle of terrestrial history. It grew less and
less attractive, and the elders came to the decision that
it had almost better pass unnoticed by all but the most
mature and experienced. Thus it became the more

Ethics 565

necessary to open up other spheres of stimulus and in-
spiration. The thoughts of the race gravitated, first
to other stars, then to the exuberant life they found in
interstellar space. For a time they thought that only
in other worlds could be found intelligences like their
own to stimulate them by their competition; and their
intellectual energy was set upon opening up intercourse
with the inhabitants of these. The imaginative fami-
lies published book after book on the possibilities and
means of stellar intercommunication, and afterwards
of stellar migration. Astronomy and its subsidiary
and allied sciences and arts for several centuries out-
paced all others in development. The world began to
seem narrow and prison-like, so eager was Limanoran
thought after stellar flight. All the conditions of voy-
aging through space were investigated, all available
means experimented on, all the possible routes and
their laws discovered. It seemed as if within a few
centuries the round of the earth would be spurned, and
the nearest star colonised by terrestrial beings.

The discovery of the varied life inhabiting the ether
gave pause to all such speculations and schemes. It
was manifestly possible to find stimulus from intelli-
gences nearer than the other planets. Infinite space,
instead of being a desert strewn with the wrecks or
embryos of stars, is as full of life, and of the elements
and nuclei of life, as any world which spins through it.
They had ever counted it as unlikely that the life and
the life-energy of the cosmos should be confined to the
star-dust strewn over it, or that its vast interstellar
spaces should be given up to nothing but the passage
of rays from star to star, cold and inhospitable to every
form of existence. They felt it to be more in accord-
ance with the lavishness of nature that these spaces

566 Limanora

should be life-crammed instead of life-proof. Why
should life be unable to adapt itself to the conditions
of space, when it has been found to adapt itself to the
bewildering variety of conditions existing on the sur-
face of any one world at different stages of its develop-
ment, and even to the infinite variety of conditions that
govern the countless stars ?

On the first discovery of life beyond the atmosphere
they were led by the medical investigators to think
that it was merely embryonic, waiting to colonise the
worlds that pushed through it. But recent reports and
researches showed that the existences of interstellar
space were far beyond the rudimental stage. Beings as
intricately organised as themselves left impressions on
their supra-aerial lavolans. They grew more and
more convinced that the senses which had evolved
in them, amid the gross atmosphere of the earth and
with the gross feeding that alone would suit terrene
constitutions, were fit to detect no other creatures than
those developed under similar terrestrial conditions.
Their more recent and more refined developments
of sensuous perception, and still more their latest
mechanical inventions, had brought them within range
of an infinit}^ they had not dreamt of. Daily came
in from above the atmosphere reports that confirmed
their old belief in the vast and varied population of
space. Beings, so constituted as never to impress
sight or hearing such as men had, yet fit to hold their
own with the noblest spirits that earthly imagination
had ever conceived, swam close to their atmosphere,
close enough to leave their impress on the sensitive
films of their courier-instruments, close enough for
their own later-developed senses to perceive, if only
these were more exquisitely trained. What a vista

Ethics 567

of new stimulus the knowledge opened up to their
imaginations!

There was no more need of projects for stellar migra-
tion. Here were beings loftier than themselves at the
very gates of their senses, possible sources of exalted,
if not divine, influence. Out of them would flow into
this little island energy that would give measureless
impetus to its inhabitants. Who could place a limit to
the nobleness of the existences they might find in the
ether, once they were on this track, and were refining
and ennobling the perceptive power of their senses?
There was no conceivable end to the ethical elevation
and development they might reach, now that they had
pierced the prison walls of the earth. .The sublimer
amongst their old beliefs were, indeed, coming true in
the fuller fruition of scientific discovery. These they
had long laid aside, lest they should be mere fancies
based upon illusion and delusion, when they saw the
evil that the perversions of them by churches and
priests worked amongst men. Till they discovered a
sounder basis for them than faithmongers asserted for
their crude superstitions, they felt they must not enter-
tain them seriously or found action upon them; and
over they threw them till they should find their way to
them again upon the solid ground of scientific reason.

Now that they saw so wide a horizon before them
they knew that they need no longer seek stimulus in
the races of men that they had left so far behind them,
and they rejoiced. For, though there were ever noble
and wise individuals to be found here and there
throughout the masses of the nations, and though
they knew that these set the standard of morality to
the world around them, the bulk of men lagged far in

568 Limanora

the rear and often, when unnoticed, sneaked into the
barbarity and vice which they had been persuaded to
abandon. The moral law of a nation, or race, or
period is voluntarily carried into practice only by the
few best of the mature men and women; in fact, their
lives and characters are the makers and arbiters of the
moral law. Their fellow-countrymen and contempo-
raries feel the ideal thus held out practically before
them as a mysterious influence that surrounds and
shepherds them into the path of right. Sometimes, if
the age or nation has degenerated, the mystery comes
from the best men of the past through books, or still
more powerfully through tradition and instinct; this
unaccountable influence they call conscience, or the
sense of duty, or the voice of God, or some other name
that indicates its mystery, its directing power, and its
superior standpoint. Priests and primitive legislators
try to formulate its commands in definite codes, and at
a later stage thinkers and philosophers attempt to rea-
son out its maxims, and find a unity and universality
in them. But the influence defies such codification
and rationalisation; with the growth of the ages it
overflows and antiquates the primitive attempt at its
petrifaction, and the variety of codes in different races
or in different periods laughs to scorn all efforts at
finding a universal basis for them. As soon as a code
is proclaimed or a philosophical system worked out, it
begins to be antiquated; the best find a better ideal in
front of them and, striving after it, reveal the flaws in
the life they have hitherto lived, or they resign them-
selves passively to the drift of circumstance and degen-
erate into luxury and license; in the one case the
influence overflows the code or system, and makes it
seldom necessary or apparent to the view of the race ;

Ethics 569

in the other it ebbs from it and leaves it high and dry,
the flouted, neglected wreck of an age gone by.

After all, moral law is nothing but the example and
character of the best of them working dimly upon
their yearning and capacity for advance; and their
best are limited by the point of view of their time and
surroundings. A progressive race or age soon dis-
covers the flaws in its accepted codes or systems and
throws doubt on their authority. It is only in a stag-
nant or retrograde period that there is no scepticism or
free thought; sufficient unto it is the law that has come
down out of the past; so satisfied are its people with it
that they never live up to it, and never feel any qualms
of conscience or entertain troubled thoughts about its
neglect. Developing civilisation means developing
ethics; the best of a race advance to higher points of
view, and soon come to be astonished at the narrow
and primitive moral law their forefathers have handed
down to them. As they advance in ideals, the con-
science of the mass of their countrymen or contempo-
raries advances too; what is the rare virtue or heroism
of the noblest of one age becomes the commonplace of
the next ; what was the weakness or vice of all becomes
the crime of the outcast and atavist. Injunctions not
to kill are soon superfluous to all but the criminally in-
clined ; addressed to a whole people, they imply an age
of the greatest rudeness and ferocity.

I realised this more and more clearly as I continued
to live amongst this wonderful people, and to see into
their lives. The criminal and grossly atavistic had
been long ago swept out of the island and vicious ten-
dencies against the moral law of past ages had vanished
before selection, crossing, and training. They would
have laughed if they had been enjoined not to kill, or

57° Limanora

steal, or lie, or commit adultery. It would be like
telling the civilised Europeans not to eat each other,
especially when uncooked, or telling the latter-day
Englishman not to enslave his brothers. The proud
tribes of wild men counted it as one of their noblest
prerogatives to banquet on their slain foes and even
on their dead relatives, and the fathers of the present
race of English and Americans, sensitive as these latter
are to the crime of enslavement, held their slaves with
no feeling that they were outraging the moral law,
whilst their grandfathers winked at the horrors of the
slave trade. The best protested and gradually their
opinions, and still more their characters and lives, sank
as a mysterious influence into the hearts of the race.
The next generation felt the protest as a moral law and
a conscience, stinging them to advance to the standard
of their noblest. The Greeks and Romans describe
and applaud in their finest literature vices that modern
men are ashamed even to mention. And it will be the
same with acts and conduct that nineteenth century
society condones and even boasts of; if the European
world advances, in a century or two respectable men
and women will be ashamed to hear them spoken of.

The lyimanorans repudiated scorn of their lowly kin,
the animals; they had long ago shed that blind and
false shame which rejected the affinity of universal
nature; man was as truly kin in his lower representa-
tives to the mammoth as the mammoth to the mollusc,
or the mollusc to the microbe. It is true they desired
close proximity to the non-human animal as little as
they did to undeveloped or degenerate man; inter-
course with a lower stage of life and intelligence, they
had long ago proved, leads ultimately to adoption of
some of its features and much of its standard, even

Ethics 57 t

where there is in it the aloofness of the master to his
slave, or the tamer to his beast; they desired no master-
dom over lower natures and so they exiled all animals
and all degenerate or undeveloped men from their
island. They welcomed, however, every indication of
approach to human traits or human intelligence in any
section of terrestrial life; it was to them no 'bewilder-
ment that they found most species of animals more
courageous and many more provident and keen in
their outlook than most men, some of them more
tender and humane to their fellows, and some infinitely
more loyal than the most advanced races. It is diffi-
cult to deny, not merely the higher emotions, but the
more difficult processes of reasoning to many of the
animals. The cunning of man is often outwitted by
them.

Facts like these, instead of driving them to find
subtle methods of explaining them away or denying
them, urged them on to greater effort in their own
evolution. They saw in them evidence that the whole
creation was striving upwards, and they resolved to
obey the universal law more and more fully and to
quicken their pace. Any new observation of animal
intelligence or advance only confirmed their faith in
the rational spirit that was working but half seen
throughout the universe, and gave them greater im-
petus on the path of development they had chosen.

Kvery new age had seen them rise above the possi-
bility of some old vice or evil tendency, reach some
new and higher mount of ethical vision, and descry
some nobler ideal ahead of them. They were far out
of reach of any return to the fierce vices or defects of
a lawless or militant past. Never since the exile of
Noola had they observed any tendency to belligerent

572 Limanora

atavism; and his return, purified and elevated, had
finally buried in oblivion that dead and degenerate
preterition. Thieving had vanished with such warlike
means of destroying and restoring the balance of po-
litical power, and its possibility ceased with the de-
valuation of all property but time, talent, and character.
Once time was taken as the standard of everything of
value instead of any dull dead stuff like gold or jewels
or land or houses, the whole view of property had
changed: for time is a living, moving entity that be-
comes great or little, valuable or valueless with the
method of using it; the life of a man limits it in quan-
tity as far as existence on the earth is concerned ; and
as soon as a race realises this, it is the rarest and most
highly prized commodity in the world; nothing can
take away its value but the heedlessness or indolence
of its possessor; no man can steal it from us but our-
selves. For many ages then it was in terms of time
that the L,imanorans had expressed everything of
value; even talent and character were thus express-
ible, for their chief value lay in their development; they
were estimated according to the rapidity with which
they could advance a definite and measurable stage.
Thus theft became an impossible crime in this island,
the true standard of all value being inseparable from
the life that possessed it.

Ikying and hypocrisy and all the crawling vermin
that spawn from them had long ago been ejected from
their systems; and wherever atavistic symptoms of
them had appeared in any child they were cauterised
by every known method, gentle or drastic. The task
of cleansing the community of insincerity and artifice
had by no means ended with the exiling of all known
liars and dissemblers. Open untruth and fraudulence

Ethics 573

vanished when the development of the intelligence and
observation of the people made it easy and universal to
divine motives and inner thoughts quite apart from the
word or the" act. Yet there was still in some a ten-
dency to evasion, or equivocation, or overstatement.
The rags of the old conventionality still hung about
them, and unawares there would check them in their
utterances an old fear lest candour should be ill-man-
ners, lest their freedom should hurt the feelings of their
auditor, or rouse the sleeping tiger in him. Year by
year was all this getting eradicated; but the process
was quickened by the evolution of the magnetic sense
and by the clarifying of the tissues of the body. The
more transparent the human system became to the
senses and the keener the senses grew, the less cue and
the less chance was there for concealment of emotion
or thought. They were all thoroughly trained in the
anatomy and physiology of the body and the brain,
and in the science that taught the physical equivalents
and accompaniments of each type of thought and emo-
tion. Even without their preternaturally keen senses
they could tell from their practical knowledge of the
human system the natural results of any word or act,
and their eyes and ears could detect signs of emotion
or motive which seemed to be non-existent. It was,
however, their magnetic sense that was the greatest
foe to all deception or concealment. They could read
the feelings that stirred in the heart of a neighbour,
and were even conscious of the definite thoughts pass-
ing in his brain.

The physical equivalents and symptoms of certain
emotions and passions, that used to be common before
the exi lings and are too common in all other races,

574 Limanora

were scarcely ever to be found in any mature L,ima-
noran; they had to be studied in the bodies, and espe-
cially in the faces, of children. Jealousy, envy, hate,
malice, anger, lust, had become obsolete' in the race,
and only the young were afflicted with them now; they
were classified as mild spiritual diseases that might, if
neglected, risk the permanence of the child in the com-
munity; they were the record of a stage through which
the race had long ago passed, and they were treated as
no fault of the child itself but its legacy from an an-
cestry it could not be made responsible for. Great
pains had been taken with these moral childish mala-
dies in former periods with the result that their ap-
pearance was now seldom virulent or dangerous and
never fatal, and that every household knew by heart
the simple rules and specifics for checking their de-
velopment. The worst characteristic of them was
that they were infectious; but the solitary system of
education rendered this inoperative; in fact this epi-
demic nature of the moral disorders of children
made the adoption of the one-child household and
the one-pupil school seem an absolute necessity. Oc-
casionally, through some strong atavistic taint in the
nature, the appearance of one or more of these mala-
dies in a child threatened its whole spiritual life; then
all the science and wisdom of the island were brought
to bear upon it; the nerves and tissues of the part of
the human system affected, whether in brain or heart,
were isolated and powerful electro-magnetic instru-
ments were applied to them so as to atrophy them and
render them inactive; the most successful educators of
the island were joined to the parents or proparents in
the effort to get rid of the evil ; and the child or youth
was constantly brought into intercourse with the

Ethics 575

noblest natures who exercised to the full their morally
healing powers. If the malady still tainted the nature
up to maturity and outbalanced all the good in it in
spite of such continued curative efforts, then were the
elders sadly driven to the ultimate step of deporting
the diseased personality. But this had not occurred
for generations, and it was hoped that the necessity for
drastic remedies would cease in a few years. Already
the virulence of these childish ailments had almostdisap-
peared and they had grown so mild in their attacks that
few but the guardians observed their approach. They
were generally confined to fixed periods of childhood
or youth, periods that corresponded to the ages of past
history in which they severally raged in the natures of
their ancestors. But every new generation saw these
periods shortened and driven farther back towards the
beginning of life.

The sense of shame that attaches to some or all of
these emotions in the best of advanced races is a sign
that they are recognised as moral maladies and that
with farther advance they will be forced back into the
earlier stages of life. But, as they are, the need to
conceal envy and jealousy, malice, anger, and lust
and their symptoms, is felt, and this induces and con-
firms wide-spread habits of insincerity and deception
in most civilised peoples, Western as well as Eastern.
This desire of concealment has seated the habit of dis-
simulation so widely and so deeply in the breasts of all
that the bolder and more roughly practical openly avow
it as a means necessary to their advancement in life.
It had been felt ages before in I,imanora that as long
as these hateful emotions lurked in the hearts of men
and women, there could be no final expulsion of the
still more hateful insincerity. Now that they were

576 Limanora

relegated to childhood, concealment of the inner emo-
tions had vanished and the habit of petty evasion and
dissimulation had been entirely eradicated. Even the
histrionic in manner and gesture and facial expression
had disappeared after having been subjected to drastic
treatment; it had been criticised and derided whenever
it showed itself in any youth; for it was only by the
young and immature that so crude an artificiality could
ever be adopted.

One of the last refuges of insincerity was artificial
self-abasement. As soon as humility before the daily
marvels of the universe came to be a common attitude
amongst them, its ape, spurious self-depreciation, ap-
peared. Young men and women would grossly under-
state their achievements or claims, chiefly in order to
set up a reaction in the minds of their friends and com-
panions, and tempt them to overstatement. Ridicule
soon put this habit of poor and common natures to
rout. The Limanorans were now proud of anything
they had done well or nobly and were not ashamed to
acknowledge it. They were willing without vaunting
or mock-modesty to talk of any invention or discovery
or any good or courageous deed, but in that simple,
ingenuous way which revealed nothing but anxiety to
enlighten others as to the methods of success and to
stir them to advance beyond it. They needed none of
that self-advertisement which is the bane of advanced
and ambitious civilisations; everything of merit in
their conduct and labour and its products was valuated,
they knew, with an exactitude that left no room for
misacceptation by their friends and companions.
Everyone was so eager to find an advance in his neighr
bour's work or system that no effort was needed to ex-
plain or commend it. When done its merits would be

Ethics 577

recognised to the full. The elders in their periodical
reviews of the work and the progress of the community
would estimate it at its full value, and it was one of the
most important parts of the training of the youth to
appraise the value of every deed and step with a strict
impartiality of judgment. To mete out justice to
everything in life was impressed upon the young
nature as one of the foremost of duties; and to see
every feature of history and existence with a dispas-
sionate and unerring eye was one of the chief aims of
lyimanoran education.

Thus it was that for a time they enjoyed the comedy
of life as it passed in other regions of the world, for
they could see very clearly the exact merits of every
man and every deed, and the credulity and infatuation
which made them unrecognisable in popular estimation.
Delusion reigned supreme and the best of the comedy
was the ease with which some masters of the art of self-
advertisement could swell their puny proportions into
the appearance of colossal amplitude; they knew every
stop in public opinion, and could play on its gullibility
with consummate art. The Limanoran was taught to
place every human achievement in the perspective of
the future, and as he looked and heard through the
idrovamolan, the whole of life, as it went in other na-
tions, seemed one continued bathos, ridiculous dispro-
portion between what it appeared to be and what it was.

But they ever saw a darker side to the spectacles
they witnessed through this singular instrument, and
their laughter was softened and modified by indignation
and sorrow. There was a counterpart to the gullibility
and applause in the deep-rooted habit of detraction and
slander. If any had the power to see conduct and men
as they were, impartially and clearly, they were not al-

Limanora

lowed to use it, so busy were the tongues of traducers
and parasites. All human deeds were either under-
estimated or overestimated, generally underestimated if
the doer or possessor had no favours to bestow and no
power or influence to exhibit. Aspersion and back-
biting were common habits; for the majority were un-
distinguished and only in courts and the circles of the
great did that of overestimation find any headway.

A trivial, yet pathetic, phase of the comedy was the
excessive self-esteem that ran parallel with the torrent
of detraction. In Limanora the fountains of both had
dried up together. For vanity is the effort of a man's
emotions to compensate for the fraud that others con-
stantly commit upon reputation. Robbery of material
things is sternly repressed in most civilised communi-
ties; thus far have they attained in their hostility to
socialism; finally one or two have begun to be uneasy
about fair fame as a possession more valuable than any
wealth and have attempted to formulate the crime in
some crude law of libel that is found yearly as inade-
quate and as primitive as one of the codes of ancient
legislators. But the petty robberies of good fame
rather than the open brigandage of it make none feel
safe. Tongues will keep wagging, and as long as they
wag, the conduct or character of some will surely be
undervalued. The consciousness of this, that none but
the great or distinguished will get their due or more
than their due, keeps self-esteem alive in the breasts of
all, and self- approbation an unceasing attitude. Men
feel that they must recoup themselves out of the un-
willing feelings of others for the perpetual fraud upon
their reputation. Self-overestimation is the natural
complement of the consciousness of detraction. Com-
monly the sensitive organisation refuses to rest under

Ethics 579

the unending injustice and will try to set itself right
with the world; but most sink after a time into sullen
endurance of the wrong and cease to speak of it, think-
ing it irremediable.

Nothing so greatly astonished the L,imanorans as the
concomitant disappearance of detraction and vanity
from their midst. One of their earliest crusades was
that against evil speaking; it was easier than they had
thought, for already the principle of generosity to
others had begun to work and reputation was counted
more valuable than any property. When magnanimity
had eradicated the habit of disparagement, the training
in impartial use of the judgment prevented the nature
swinging into the opposite extreme of shouting hosan-
nas over the nothings of daily life. As they gained
clear-sightedness in estimating human actions and char-
acter, they found that the cues of vanity had disap-
peared. They had no need of crusading against the
vice; it had been vanquished.

Another defect that seemed to have vanished with-
out effort was immodesty. The lustful had been exiled
and it was easy to eradicate from the natures of those
that remained all trace of sexual passion, and with it
all pruriency. The chief purpose of sex in nature, that
of propagation of the family, became its sole purpose ;
and this, by the control which the elders exercised over
posterity, grew as rare as death. Its other ends, the
development of self-sacrifice and the growth of love
and friendship, had been completely detached from it
and rationalised. Procreation with the extension of
the race into the future was counted so tremendous a
responsibility that most preferred to postpone it as far
in life as the instinct of the people would allow. The
sexual passion thus died out of their minds as out of

580 Limanora

their natures, just as the mere appetites of eating and
drinking had died out. They had become parts of the
rational nature when they were thought of at all.

There was, therefore, nothing to be ashamed of and
nothing to conceal. Immodesty vanished with the cue
and motive for modesty. They wore irelium draperies
more to temper the power of heat and cold and the
rigours of the upper atmosphere, and to aid them in
flight, than to hide their bodies from the eyes of others.
For the draperies were gossamer-like and semi-diapha-
nous and emphasised the beauty and grace of the body
as an expression of soul. It was not the face alone that
interpreted the mind, or attracted by its radiance. Mag-
netism rayed from every limb; and none of the surface
of the body was lost .under masses of garments; it
all came into play as expressive of the life within.
They shrank at first from the unhealthy pallidity of
my body as it appeared when I first donned their rai-
ment, but under the transparency of my new garments
it soon lost its ghastly whiteness and acquired the
ruddy, healthy tints of the face. For a time I shrank
from the eyes of my comrades, but as I grew accus-
tomed to their absolute purity of thought, I lost all
consciousness of my body. There can be no modesty
or immodesty where there is nothing to conceal. It
was one of their subordinate aims to simplify and
purify the functions of the human system, so that none
of them should be offensive to any of the senses, new
or old.

By this semi-diaphanous exposure of most of the sur-
face of the body there was far more space of skin for
the development of sensations and new types of senses.
In their pre-purgation ages, when the greater part of
the corporeal system had to be muffled in opaque gar-

Ethics 581

ments for the sake of what was called decency, the finer
modes of perception came to be concentrated in the head
and the hand; one sense crowded another and blunted
its observations. Now every inch of the corporeal sur-
face was open to the influences of sunlight and mag-
netism and the other energies that so freely permeated
space, and new forms of perception began to develop
over the body, chiefly refined modifications of touch.
The region of the shoulders became especially sensitive
to magnetic indications. The arms and chest mono-
oplised the finer sensations of muscular force, and es-
pecially of strain and push. Their feet came to gauge
with great subtleness the strength and direction of cur-
rents of the wind as they flew through the atmosphere.
The spinal region tested the temperature of the sur-
rounding space better than any other part of the body,
reacting at once to the slightest change in heat or cold.
Another advantage of the half-transparent raiment was
the ease with which the slightest change of emotion or
thought could be seen, making concealment and hypo-
crisy an impossibility. A third was the aid it gave
the medical elders in their periodical inspections of the
health of each member of the community; with un-
strengthened senses they could detect the smallest ob-
struction in any of the organs or tissues, so that a mere
passing notice might be enough to report on the health
of the people.

But if the sex-problem had retained its old obtrusive-
ness, this seemingly superficial but really important re-
form in dress would have been impracticable. Amongst
the earliest questions that the Limanoran scientists
faced was the place of sex in the universe. After
minute and wide research they came to the conclusion

582 Limanora

that it was but an accident of existence on some worlds.
It was not an essential of the propagation of life; for
some species, like bacteria, multiply by mere fission, so
that part of the individual is immortal, and others, like
the medusae, and ferns, and mosses, alternate asexual
with sexual reproduction. It was manifestly no char-
acteristic of the first and lowliest forms of life that
settled on the earth; in fact large sections of vegetal
life retain the older habit parallel with the new or
sexual habit; any piece of many plants and trees cut
off and thrust into the earth will become a new plant
or tree of the same kind without the intervention of a
seed or germinative stage. But the change in habit
must have been introduced into the world not long
after the appearance of animal life upon it; for it is
only in the least-highly organised animals that par-
thenogenesis appears in any form. Their conjecture
was that sexuality originated from the meeting of the
germs of two worlds on which life had not gone far on
the path of evolution. The newcomers would be un-
able to adapt themselves and their mode of generation
to the new conditions they had to meet; and where
members of the two types settled side by side in a po-
sition isolated from their kind, the instinct of propaga
tion would evolve out of their proximity a new mode
of generation, that would, from the cross-fertilisation of
two worlds and the combination of the vital energy of
both, make a progeny more vigorous and a develop-
ment easier and more rapid. The species that re-
mained faithful to parthenogenetic propagation, and
those that adopted the new mode only partially, fell
behind in the evolutionary race. Sexual generation,
uniting in itself the vital principles of two universes,
swiftly improved the qualities of the species that adopted

Ethics 583

it and made them dominant upon the earth. Asexual
propagation, the easier and more primitive, gave the
advantage in numbers of individuals to the vegetal and
lowly animal species that clung to it, but left them
almost incapable of evolution. On and upwards have
passed the dominant species through the invertebrates
and the mammals up to man, guided by that bi-sexual
principle which has in it the stimulus of two types of
life and two universes. Nor did it seem to them con-
trary to the analogy that some worlds should have in
the life upon them a tri-sexual or even a quadri-sexual
mode of propagation, according to the types of vital
principle which have settled and continued upon them.
Wherever multi-sexual generation holds sway, there life
is rarer but swifter, and evolution carries it into those
higher reaches where localisation of it upon an orb is
unnecessary.

It was out of sexuality, they acknowledged, that all
the higher phases of existence upon earth had come,
love, friendship, self-sacrifice;' this, too, had given to
humanity in its nobler developments the irrepressible
yearning for another and extra-terrene sphere and an-
other life. A vital principle issuing from a different
universe seemed to have kept within it the memory
of its first home if not of the free existence of space.
And in man, at least, this had come to consciousness of
itself and led him to religious reverence and devotion
and the expectation of immortality.

They considered none the less that sex had almost
finished its task in many worlds, and would, in no very
distant age, have accomplished all it could do for the
Ivimanoran race. When a principle of life has done its
task it must retire and give place to something better;
else it would become retrogressive and wholly evil, a

584 Limanora

mere despot selfishly stopping all progress. Every
race that meant to quicken the pace of its evolution
had to take command of it and guide it to its own
higher ends. It is the prerogative of the nobler types
of man to raise nature above her lower needs; the
Limanoran ideal was to develop the creative power of
the human system so far that it might master all the
secrets of life and be able to mould human beings and
breathe the breath of life into them, and thus they would
be able to supersede the sexual mode of propagation.

As it was, they had gone far towards the complete
mastery of the sexual principle, and could mould and
guide it to any purpose that the future of the race de-
manded. They knew the conditions that would govern
any new human variety they needed in the state just
as well as they could produce new modifications of
trees and plants and flowers. They read the nature
of each individual on the island as easily as they could
read a book. But besides this they had in the pedi-
gree-annals in the valley of memory a complete account
of all the possibilities of any family or any branch of
it. From the developments of recent years and the
outlook that they ever kept up far into the future they
judged when some new type of nature would be needed
for some post in the community and gauged exactly
the qualities that would have to be blended in order to
produce it. Then turning to the valley of memories,
they studied the characters and possibilities of the
various families that had one or more of those qualities
exceptionally developed. By the aid of the physio-
logical and biological experts they were able to fix the
two out of which the individual parents would have
to be chosen ; and from their knowledge of the charac-
ter and history of every member, the elders of these

Ethics 585

two families along with the medical elders were able to
indicate the man and the woman who would exactly
fulfil the purpose of the state. Years were spent on
maturing the pair in the directions required and in
entangling their imaginations and affections mutually.
None were allowed to assume the responsibilities of
parenthood till they were matured to their fullest pos-
sibility; for they held that all the essential characteris-
tics of the two natures had to be developed before the
embryo could be produced in its fullest and most virile
form.

One of the most singular features of this moulding
of posterity was that they did not always choose the
most highly developed to become the parents of the
commonweal. For it had often been found in the past
that the individual who had brought his peculiar
faculties or qualities to the highest state of refinement
in his own life had exhausted the natural wellspring
of them, and that he handed them on in most dimin-
ished degree to his children. They often preferred in
their selection of possible parents a member of a family
who exhibited no exceptional energy in the use of its
special talent; sometimes the least active and the least
conspicuous were selected. In them individual work
had never overstrained their faculty; it lay fallow for
a generation and was likely to spring forth with ex-
ceptional vigour the next. To this I attributed their
acceptance of my own imperfect nature in their midst
and my selection for mating with Thyriel.

When a pair had bred the child that was required, if
they were not conspicuous for wisdom or self-control,
it was taken from them and given to a new pair who
became its true parents and trained it in the direction
it ought to take. These proparents were generally

586 Limanora

more successful than parents in educating and moulding
a character; they never allowed the bias of natural af-
finity to affect the future of the child; the parents,
besides being swayed by the pride of parenthood and the
vigour of their affection for it, were too closely akin to
it in qualities and character to view it from an impar-
tial and independent standpoint; and the proparents
were as a rule selected on account of their contrastive
qualities, qualities which would form the complement
to its own.

Though so much care was spent on the choice of the
stock, they considered it far more important to have
the citizens of the future properly trained, and were
quite unbending in their insistence that every child
should have the most suitable natures in the commun-
ity to educate it, whether these should be its own
parents or proparents. Nor for ages had more than
one child been permitted in a household at one time.
If a pair had proved themselves exceptionally success-
ful in the production and moulding of the two children
they owed to the community, they were allowed to
adopt for a lengthened period the profession of parent,
by far the most important, if not really the only, pro-
fession in the island. But they must bring one child
up to maturity before they undertook another. For,
they held, there was no problem so complicated, no
duty so responsible, no task so exhausting for every
faculty, as the training of a human being in its earlier
stages; to sculpture a new and noble nature was con-
sidered the greatest creative work that a Limanoran
could achieve for the state; the greatest talents that
ever appeared on earth could not be better spent than
on the parental profession. Another and as important
reason for the unitary basis of the household was the

Ethics 587

moral contagion imperfect natures bring to bear on each
other. Children were never allowed together except
under the strictest supervision; for they soon undid all
the work of their guardians, and confirmed in each
other the retrogressive savagery through which they
were passing. Before the Limanorans had come to
their full heritage of scientific knowledge and wise
experience, they had allowed for a few generations
households of three or more children together, in order
to keep up the breed. But they soon discovered this
feature of their domestic life to be at the bottom of
the slowness of their development, and abandoned it.
After long experience they decided that it was better
worth while for the race to devote half a century of the
life of the wisest and ablest to the training of one
nature than to do any other work to be found in the
universe. The greatest book, the most illuminating
discovery or invention, was as nothing compared with
a living centre of development and progress. Parent-
hood and proparenthood well done were considered the
greatest claims to gratitude and love, and to everlasting
memory if there were such a thing. For a man and a
woman to have given to the state by fifty years' work
a better trained, more nobly moulded character, with
larger possibilities than they themselves had was to
have done more than if they had discovered and
mapped out a new sphere for science and thought. It
was one of the greatest honours therefore that the
community could bestow upon any pair, to select them
a third or fourth time for parenthood or proparenthood.
That the two sexes were both needed for the training
of a young nature to maturity was one of the most un-
hesitating conclusions from their experience. In spite
of the obliteration of all demarcating lines between the

588 Limanora

sexes as to privileges and duties in the state, there was
nothing more clear to them than the permanence of
the distinction in their natures, as far as life upon earth
was concerned ; it had grown less and less marked as
the ages went on, and as maternity came to be a mere
episode in the long life of a woman, yet it remained as
real as it ever had been, passing into every phase of
the nature, imaginative and intellectual as well as
emotional and physical, and becoming salient and
striking in the procreative era of life. As the animal
part of the nature fell into greater subordination, it
needed keener powers of observation to note the differ-
ence; yet it had left its permanent mark upon the spirit.
To women was assigned work which required slow
continuous effort; for although they are more emo-
tional, they are also by nature more passive. The
temperature of the female in all species is lower than
that of the male, and in human beings this means less
energy and less explosiveness; the woman is ever
building up her system by storing sources of energy,
the man is ever using up his stores of energy in im-
petuous outbursts of work. The generations of active
employment in. which L,imanoran women had been en-
gaged, and the complete cessation of -the warlike pur-
suits that used to fill the lives of the men, had not
obliterated these distinctions. The women were still
best at sedentary occupations; whatsoever needed con-
tinuity and singleness of purpose was given to them;
for they have more unity of nature, and can settle down
for long periods to an investigation that would be
monotonous to a man, and are on the whole longer
lived. So any investigation that was uninvolved, but
needed intensity of application on the part of one mind
for more than an average lifetime, was handed over to

Ethics 589

a woman; and where the work of several was required
for a generation or two, a woman was always one of
the workers in order to preserve the continuity.

In the imaginative families it was generally the men
who did the most striking work. Their bursts of
energy enabled them to go by leaps. They pioneered
best into the future; they found the new principles for
advance in invention and discovery. The women
gathered the material for the sciences; the men in-
vented and applied the great hypotheses leading to
new laws and new advances; they also showed the way
in progress, and tended rather to revolution than to
rest. Whatsoever needed artistic talent was theirs to
do. In physical work, wherever rapidity of movement
and fitful application of torrents of energy were re-
quired, the men took the lead; for they were small and
active, having now no distinctively muscular employ-
ments, like war and hunting, to develop their muscle
and bone exceptionally. The women, as naturally ac-
cumulative instead of prodigal of energy, were larger
and more passive, and took up departments of labour
that needed long and gentle persistence. In counsel
they were the conservative element, and in all the as-
semblies but those that superintended investigation into
the future, invention, and discovery, that is, in all
councils of judgment, they slightly predominated in
numbers. If they had wholly guided the community,
it would have stood still or moved at a rate that would
not have been noticeable in the generations of men.
Happily the masculine imagination dominated the
civilisation, and hence it was ever quickening its pace.
But the women were no less useful in preventing revo-
lutionary progress, and in making the men wait and
meditate over the leaps they thought of taking.

59° Limanora

It was not so much sex-function itself, as the im-
press it had left upon the natures of the people that
supplied a rough-and-ready classification of types. A
few of the women who were especially fitted to be
mothers were assigned to the maternal profession; their
natures seemed moulded to bring forth strong, healthy,
unexhausted offspring, fit for the duties of a new ad-
vance. There were other women who because of their
nervous vigour and inclination to exhaust their best
energies in work were not the most suitable for the
production of children, and yet by their sympathy and
wisdom and love of the young seemed especially created
to bring up children as citizens; these adopted the
proparental profession. A third type of women were,
on account of their quick, irritable vigour and their
super-emotional temperament and lack of self-control,
considered incapable of either function except on rare
occasions; and they formed the largest class, the
worker-women, rarely generative and always uneduca-
tive; they were engaged in the sedentary, acquisitive,
and continuous employments that demanded no great
strain on the imagination or the creative powers or the
muscular vigour. But none in the community were
wholly freed from daily active work both of body and of
mind, not even those whose lives were given up to the
profession of maternity. Amongst men all were eligible
as fathers; for though there were always a special diet
and training for prospective paternity, these might be
enforced simultaneously with the usual work. Not
all, however, were called on to exercise paternity; it
was a rare and little-noticed duty, and left small im-
press on the community. But there were some who
on account of their great wisdom and self-control and
lofty character were specially fitted for the rearing of

Ethics 591

youth, and these formed the male proparental profes-
sion. These had their other duties to perform in the
family and to the state as well as to attend to their in-
dividual households, but they were dedicated to the
guidance of posterity; their eyes were more on the
future than even those of the imaginative families.
The rest of the men formed the class of male workers
at creative and imaginative work, and at muscular
work that required agility and concentration of force.

Of the numbers in these different classes the elders
had full control. They knew all the physiological laws
governing the proportions of the sexes and types, and
by their dietary and training and medical precautions
they could fill the exact number of vacancies to be
anticipated in any class. For instance, if one was
needed for the profession of maternity, almost all the
energy of both parents was spent for a time in nutrition ;
they were isolated from most activities, surrounded
with what in other civilisations would be called luxur-
ies, and encouraged to spend their time in resting. So,
if a male worker were required, the man and woman
selected for parenthood were active workers them-
selves; and during their generative period their nutri-
tion was reduced to the minimum for sustaining their
energies, whilst they were encouraged to put all the
activity they were capable of into their daily work.
Their manuals of guidance in the difficult work of fill-
ing prospective vacancies in the community were full
of minute detail which was based upon long experience
carefully recorded and classified, and still more upon
scientific experimentation in human embryology and
physiology.

It was one of the earliest conquests of the future
that they made after the great purgation, this guidance

592 Limanora

of the sexual and other characteristics of embryos.
They knew the exact stage at which any new organ or
function appeared, for they had first of all studied the
moulding of embryos in animals; and afterwards, by
the aid of their new photographic and microscopic ap-
paratus that revealed the minutest detail of any part or
movement within the living human body, they were
able to study the effect of changes in exercise or diet or
mode of life upon the development of the human em-
bryo. Nothing was neglected to make the knowledge
complete and scientific, nothing that might help to turn
the science of embryology into a creative art. The in-
vention of instruments which could take the senses of
the investigators close to any internal item of the living
system had made an era in the history of physiology,
and cancelled the necessity of anatomy as its handmaid.
The most microscopic change in the structure of any
tissue in the innermost part of the body became patent
to the eye or the ear or the electric sense of research.
Embryology had thus become almost an exact science;
even the physiological side of it had attained to such
exactitude as to make it practically an art. The medi-
cal elders could investigate the health of the embryo
and guide its development as well as in the case of the
full-grown child.

They were thus able to formulate a complete art for
the moulding of the unborn to the purpose the elders
indicated as best for the future of the race. Training
and education in the truest sense of the words began
long before birth. Of course it had begun with the
father and mother, if not with the ancestry; but the
directly plastic art of fashioning the character began
with the first appearance of life. The elders would
have blamed themselves if any sign of gross atavism

Ethics 593

had shown itself in a youth, now that they had full
command of his prenatal history, and for generations
retrogression had become an impossibility in the race.
In former ages it had been one of the most difficult
moral problems to fix the responsibility of a man's
crimes; somewhat was due to his own choice; but part,
they saw, was due to his ancestry, and still more to his
parents, not only in their training of him, but in their
prenatal preparation if they were not careful to exclude
gross or criminal ideas and emotions from their systems
whilst he was in process of formation. Now they were
able to apportion the blame with ease if anything went
astray in the character of the child. They were there-
fore minutely careful in the precautions they took not
only in the half-century of education, but in the choice
of ancestry and in the guidance of the prenatal develop-
ment. To prospective parents the character of the
future offspring was as a conscience to their daily con-
duct and method of life. Every thought, emotion, act,
was guided by a sense that it would affect the embryo
of the coming citizen.

The newest addition to their list of sciences, the
physiology of ethics, put into their hands one of the
most effective aids to this plasmic art of character, pre-
natal and postnatal. With their instruments of in-
vestigation into the human tissue ever advancing in
refinement and power, they were able at last to local-
ise the physical centre and equivalent of each emo-
tion; and thus having mapped out the brain and the
nerve-centres, they were able to watch with their new
modifications of the lavolan the palpitating life and
movement in each part with the strong manifestations

of its special feeling. Step by step they found their
38

594 Limanora

way towards the nosology of these centres, and classi-
fied every disease that turned an emotion from right to
wrong. Whenever a lyimanoran child became afflicted
with an evil or retrogressive passion, he was hurried
off to the ethical laboratory, and the nerve-centres of
his emotional and moral nature were microscopically
photographed as they worked; a complete history of
his tissues was recorded on irelium-slips, and, after he
had gone, the investigators could run these through
the recording instrument and study the phases of the
feeling or passion at leisure. The bursts of mistaken
emotion were livingly photographed with the greatest
care, and afterwards the records were watched through
their most powerful clirolans. Then experiments were
made in finding remedies which would check the
growth of the disease in the tissue. At first the thera-
peutics of morality were merely empirical; they tried
the remedies which had been successful with the com-
mon physical ailments of humanity, and found most
fail, a few succeed. By degrees they discovered that
the most powerful antidote against the moral poison
lay in the character of the operator; wherever the
ethical investigator had led a nobler life, the cure was
more rapid and effective; wherever the attendant had
more development of intellect than of lofty moral prin-
ciple, the patient lingered and often relapsed. Yet
there were other prophylactics of a more material kind
that greatly aided in the recovery of the patient.
Hygienic measures and courses were prescribed for
preventing the recurrence of the disorder; and at last
something not unlike a science of the art of moral
healing seemed to emerge out of the empiricism and
chaos.

This culminated in the establishment of an ethical

Ethics 595

sanatorium, which was in reality a children's hospital
for obstinate moral diseases. No mature or half-mature
lyimanoran had for ages shown symptoms of a relapse
upon any ancestral or barbaric ethical code, and the
mild moral ailments lasting for only a few hours or
days were easily managed by the parents or proparents.
Gentle influence, or at most gentle discipline, was all
that was needed to dislodge the evil spirit, or if that
did not succeed, magnetic remedies were applied to the
part of the nervous centres affected.

Should the moral defect still hold out obstinately
against all remedies, the patient was removed to the
hospital for treatment. There were collected together
as moral physicians and nurses the wisest and noblest
personalities of the race, who applied all their therapeu-
tic power to the centre that was supposed to be the
source of the disease. But the centre had been scien-
tifically examined and fixed by the ethical investigators,
who reproduced the parts affected and their symptoms
in greatly magnified forms, and suggested the various
physical remedies that would aid the sanative influ-
ences of the physicians and nurses. The child was
isolated from circumstances and conditions tending to
reinforce the moral poison; and his better nature was
invigorated and encouraged, so that it might be able to
throw off the germs of the malady.

Within recent times the ethical investigators had
made great advances in their science. The immediate
stimulus of the progress was accidental, as so often had
been the case, or in other words it had come from out-
side their recognised spheres of causation. An epi-
demic of deceit had almost simultaneously seized upon
the children of the community, in spite of the solitary
method of training adopted, Boys and girls who had

596 Limanora

not seen each other for months were on the same day
impelled to habits of concealment, even when they were
in the stage of development that corresponded to the
ravening fury and open warfare of the barbaric past.
Nothing in their ordinary methods of research could
furnish a cause for the outbreak. They searched the
general condition of the previous moral health of the
children, and found it excellent. None of the patients
had come near each other for long periods; none of
them had shown any symptoms of the disorder before
the epidemic had appeared.

They were driven to some hypothesis quite outside
the limits of their usual sphere, for they saw that there
was something uncommon in the occurrence. Begin-
ning to suspect that the germs of the disease had come
from other regions, as had so often happened, they in-
creased the powers of their magnifying apparatus by
means of photography, and invented more delicate aids
to the investigation of the nerve-centres than they had
ever used before. On watching the part in which they
had localised the physical equivalent of deceit, they
found signs that the presence of the minutest foreign
life was disturbing the nerve-tissues. In the moving
microscopic photographs and electrographs of the
centre they could detect the growth of a new type of
microbe, inflaming and interfering with the nerves of
the part. Afterwards they found some specimens
of the disturbers in the atmosphere, and were able to
cultivate them for investigation and experiment. Soon
they accumulated a large enough quantity of the debris
to apply to the cultures themselves, and in every case
it seemed to prove a steriliser; what the minute life
had used up and thrown off acted as a poison and de-
stroyer. By means of the medicine that they manufac-

Ethics 597

tured from it they were able to annihilate or eject the
disturbers of the nerve-centre of truth in the patients.
But in curing, the part affected the moral equilibrium
of the children was upset. The bio-chemical families
applied themselves to the problem, and soon succeeded
in isolating the medicative elements from the injurious.

Thus a new and efficient method of treatment was
introduced into the ethical sanatorium. Chambers
were reserved for sublimating the drug, and thither
children were sent if any obstinate form of deceit ap-
peared in them. And by means of the sterilised form
of it they fumigated the child's quarters in any house-
hold, whenever signs of a return of the epidemic ap-
peared. The ethical investigators proceeded on the new
path thus opened up to them and were in time able to
describe and classify the microbes of moral epidemics
and their antidotes. After some years' toil they sup-
plied the ethical sanatorium with a complete scientific
pharmacopoeia, for at least all the grosser forms of vice,
all the offences against the moral codes that had been
atavised or thrown into the ancestral past.

The nerve-centres concerned with these offences were
easy to find and localise; so the minute life that inter-
fered with such centres was studied till it yielded its
secrets to science. But it was a more difficult task for
the new scientific art of therapeutic ethics to trace out
the physiology of the newer moral codes and to dis-
cover a cure for the maladies which hindered their
complete adoption into the Limanoran human system.
The moral offences they had now to deal with were
sluggishness of the higher faculties of man, acts that
dragged the thoughts downwards, dominance of a
physical need, concessions to mere nature as against
the highest knowledge of nature, excesses of emotion

598 Limanora

or disturbances of the mental equilibrium by passion,
devotion to the past, superstition, stagnancy of belief,
efforts to base belief on unreason or ignorance, faith in
a moral code as the terminus of human ethics, or in a
state of human scientific knowledge that was omnis-
cient. Step by step the ethical investigators found
their way to the nerve-centre that was disturbed when
any one of these faults appeared in a man; and after
long years of research and experiment they were able
to add to their pharmacopoeia the antidotes to these
maladies or weaknesses.

They would have thought the basis of existence
irrational, if they had persuaded themselves that ethics
was unprogressive, whilst all other things in the uni-
verse were subject to the law of evolution. A moral
code could be as easily superseded as a polity or a type
of society. At one time no race could see beyond the
moral codes of barbaric life that recognised no evil in
treachery or revenge. Some at last advanced to the
moral code of the warrior, which based every rule of
life upon the idea of honour. Later still the civilised
races of the world adopted the moral ideal of the priest,
which could find nothing good beyond the limits of
its special ecclesiastical forms. One by one these had
been antiquated and Limanoran civilisation had now
found as the basis for its moral code the principle of
the cosmos, that of evolution. To advance, to raise his
system higher, to evolve its possibilities, was the first
duty of man as understood by the Limanoraus of this
later age. To see beyond their present horizon was
their ideal.' They would rather march forward into
the darkness than stand still or retrograde in light.
To know clearly and definitely the possibilities that lay

Ethics 599

before them, and to be able to choose the best of them
was the primary and fundamental maxim of their ethi-
cal code. All others were corollaries of it.

If they had any unreasoned, unreasoning, and au-
thoritative monitor within them making for all that was
right, in short any conscience, it was now the prophetic
voice of the ideals that they were still to reach. Ages
before it had ceased to be a voice out of the past. Before
the great purgation of the island half of their education
and literature had been based upon the literatures of
two ancient peoples, to whose conquests and legacies
of energy and thought they had fallen heir. They now
shuddered at the pollution that these used to com-
municate to the minds of their youth. The ethics
running through them belonged to a stage of civilisa-
tion that had been long antiquated, and embodied
ideals now far beneath them. The heroes and wisest
men were recorded in them as having done deeds with
applause that the most atavistic of their children would
be ashamed to mention. Whatever wisdom or noble-
ness they might otherwise teach, it would be completely
neutralised by the taint of vices which were approved
or counted as venial peccadilloes. To submit their
youth to such pollution for the sake of the problematic
refinement they might gain from the books was to do
the greatest wrong a civilisation could commit, to pro-
strate its own ideals before those of a vanished and bar-
baric past. Out with the exiles went every trace of
those old literatures; and the isle of liars and the isle
of lechers had taken them to their bosoms, with the
result that they had to adopt lying and impurity as
their standards of life. To return upon any past was
to reject with recklessness the advantages that it had
gained and handed on to the centuries between. But

6oo Limanora

to adopt with deliberateness a past steeped in the gross-
est impurities, and honouring intrigue and hypocrisy,
was to commit moral suicide.

It was only in the immature that conscience, or the
future invisibly shepherding the present, was either
needed or existent. They had pitfalls and dangers
out of the savage past to avoid, and an unreasoned
instinct was an essential to their development as an
ever-present guide, authoritatively bending their steps
this way and that. This moral and instinctive antici-
pation of the future, though mysterious in its origin to
the young whose conduct it moulded, was in reality no
mystery; it came from the magnetism of the wisest and
best of the elders; the ideal these saw in front of them
and held out as the immediate goal of the race, passed
sympathetically and magnetically into the moral and
intellectual atmosphere of the island. The mature
knew whence the influence came, and grasped it ration-
ally. But it was round the young as a subtle inspira-
tion and halo that came they knew not whence; nor
dared they question it or disobey its injunctions, lest
some evil should entrap them. When they came to
maturity, they learned the origin of the mysterious
voice within, not to disregard its monitions, but to
reason them out and revise them by the light of the
advancing ideals of the race and to know that it changes
and grows like everything in the cosmos.

One of the first aims and maxims of their polity was
to let their citizens on reaching maturity think all
through their lives for themselves. The first guar-
anty of this freedom was rationality, the power of
tracing back every act and feeling and thought to
the primary principles of existence, combined with the
sense of responsibility for the future of the race. There

Ethics 60 1

was no repression, no prohibition; the prerogative and
duty of every man was to make himself fit to be a law
to himself. In former ages their ancestors used to talk
of the innocence of childhood; all that they meant
was unconsciousness of conventional emotions, ideas,
phrases, and habits, and superiority to them. They
smiled at it as a temporary stage from which they
would soon pass into the restrictions of manhood and
womanhood ; and only the greatest sages were able to
work themselves free again from conventions so far as
to be moral and noble and yet to have the innocence,
the unperturbed vision and candour of the earliest
years. But now all men and women retained the naive
openness of childhood and its artless simplicity; for
they had no conventions to trammel the freedom of
spiritual movement, no prohibitions to make the will
shrink from origination or action. Even when child-
hood or youth was checked in some mistaken career,
the check was veiled in persuasion and reasoning and
a vision of the truth. The atmosphere of freedom was
an absolute essential for the full development of indi-
viduality; and the guaranty that this freedom would
never pass into license was the fact that every mature
man and woman had a noble aim, and that the magnet-
ism of the race was around everyone. None had to
obtrude the claims of his personality upon others; and
none was abashed by a sense of despair, or the feeling
of insignificance. Humility was a virtue needing no
conscious cultivation; there was no occasion for its ap-
pearance, for the place and merits of everyone were
accurately gauged and acknowledged by all. It was
only the insignificance of all humanity against the in-
finite, of the life of this world against cosmic periods,
that deeply impressed them, and rendered them weary

602 Limanora

of efforts so feeble as those of human life. But the
mood was brief in such sanguine temperaments and
agile natures. Action they knew to be exhilaration
and health and the building up of tissue and faculty.

All they wished to be sure of was that the action
was to lead forward. The test of its morality was this:
did it make the human system progress ? How far did
it tend to make the future better than the present ?
Whether a thing was pleasant or not for the moment,
had no influence upon their choice of courses of action.
That had been the motive and guide of the barbarous
past, the artist of its conduct, the creator of its charac-
ter. The civilisation of other periods and races had
meant only the development of needs. And the pure
savage is ever superior to civilised man in this sense;
with his minimum of needs and the wherewithal to
satisfy them wherever he may find himself, he is not so
localised as even the wealthiest and most cultured man
of the most luxurious civilisations who is tied to his
property and investments, and is miserable unless in
the one or two cities where he can indulge his taste for
luxury to the full. There wras no such thing as luxury
in Limanora; everything that was brought into being
was essential for advance, for the final aim of the life.
Not needs but ultimate ends gave them their point of
view, not desires but means, not rights but duties. If
there was anything that could stir them to greater
eagerness, it was the prospect of more work for the
good of others; if anything could be looked upon as a
luxury amongst them, it was a surfeit of work that con-
templated a widening of the racial horizon. To serve
the future of all was their deepest longing. Far into
the savage past had faded the idea of servitude; and,
as they looked into history, there was nothing they

Ethics 603

were more thankful for than the disappearance of such
a necessity; for they considered the servant, especially
if slave, the despot of his master in moulding and pan-
dering to his needs and whims, and an evil despot too,
as less advanced and less cultivated.

Among the things they most deeply abhorred was
despotism. And the worst despotism of all, they held,
was the social, that which is exercised daily and hourly,
and from the vantage-ground of proximity ; the narrow
scope and limited horizon make it all the more intense.
The most accursed of despotisms is the system of espion-
age; it wrecks every chance of freedom and crushes
originality, turning the race back into crawling venom-
ous things. It is a vain attempt at complete spiritual
repression and feebly assumes omniscience and omni-
presence on the part of the despots. Its only chance
of success is a spiritual society disciplined like an army
and ruled by nothing but loyalty to its superiors who
base their authority on the assumption of intercourse
with supernatural omniscience and omnipresence; and
its only chance of continuance is grovelling prostration
of all its subjects and possible critics, in abject fear of
unknown terror and of spies in the very precincts of
the heart, who can hear and interpret its every beat.
That was one of their hells, which they occasionally
brought before their imaginations in order to warn
them against minute supervision and interference. It
was this that urged them on to complete transparency
of nature, so that their inmost thoughts and feelings
might be open to all. Kver since the liars had been
thrust forth, one of the immediate goals of their civilisa-
tion had become absolute truthfulness. Now that this
had been attained, a further goal was complete limpid-
ity of the human system. The wise elders had already

604 Limanora

been able to interpret what passed in the heart or brain
of a Limanoran ; now the aim was to make the sensuous
garment of the soul diaphanous to the magnetic sense,
if not to the eyes of all. Of nothing in his whole sys-
tem must a man be ashamed, before he could endure
such continuous confessional to his fellows, and it was
towards this goal that every Limanoran was now con-
sciously working.

The constant inspections and examinations by the
elders might seem to conflict with this horror of espion-
age and spiritual despotism. But these were voluntary
on the part of mature L,imanorans; it was one of their
recurring pleasures to be able to submit their tissues
and faculties to the wise observation of the elders, and
to gain the advantage of their experience. Had it
been felt as a despotism, it would have been abandoned
at once. With children and the immature it was a
matter of discipline; they were in the pre-purgation
stages of Limanoran history, and had to be in pupillage
and under authority. As soon as they were able to
keep step with the advancing civilisation, or in other
words to be a law to themselves, they were allowed to
walk alone and without the trammels of guidance. It
was the strenuous aim of the elders and guides of the
community to keep the atmosphere of thought free.
They were constantly reviewing and revising the end
and aim of existence in the light of the new develop-
ments of thought and science; hence its form never
became a hard dogma. They believed in ultimate
truth, but knew that nothing short of omniscience
could attain it. They were now and again getting
glimpses of it, but fought shy of expressing it in words,
for everyone would know it to be only a provisional
expression. Language itself was a shifting mirage of

Ethics 605

the mind, dependent on the point of view for its mean-
ing and even existence; and one of the most constant
duties of the community was to define and clarify it,
and to free it from its ever-growing opaqueness or
nebulosity, and the fallacies that haunted it. One
thing they never hesitated about, but grasped with un-
erring instinct; and that was the goal that they kept
before them, or in other words the advance they were
eager to make. They hated all Jesuitry, knowing that
it meant the suppression of spiritual freedom by what
merely professed to be progressive and good, and the
obscuration of spiritual truth in clouds of subtlety.
Nothing that was evil, they held firmly, could lead
ultimately to good; nothing that was retrograde could
in the end be progress.

They had learned from the revolutions of their past
how snaky and tortuous are the ways of deceit; and
the first sure sign of its triumphant success is the bold
adoption of the doctrine that good men may do evil,
provided their aim is good. Under this the liars shel-
tered themselves for ages before they were exiled.
The era of the history of the island that filled them
most with shrinking and loathing was that of the
struggle with the various forms of deceit. The first
lesson in the valley of memories was drawn from this
division of their annals; they filled their youth with
hatred and scorn of untruth and hypocrisy; no firm step
could be taken in education till this had become a deeply
rooted feeling in their natures, and nothing awakened
it so well as the study of this struggle with the liars.
But they never taught any subject merely from books
or records; everything, even history and its lessons,
was made practical and living. Deceit, for instance,

606 Limanora

was traced back to its sources in nature, and the diffi-
culty of getting rid of it was revealed by finding it so
wide spread in the lower ranks of life. Mimicry or
involuntary deceit was investigated all through plant
and animal life, and it was found to be more prevalent
the lower the investigators went in vital organisms.
Their loathing of it as a deliberate adoption amongst
human beings grew deeper as they saw that in the
animal world it belonged either to incompetence or
rapacity. The prey mimicked the form and colour of
another species that was loathsome to its enemy in
order to avoid his grasp; unconsciously the mimicry
spread, for only those members of the attractive species
which were like the repellent species escaped and pro-
pagated. Or the spoiler mimicked the form and colour
of a species that was friendly or neutral to its victim,
and only those members of the species similar to the
unfeared kind succeeded in catching enough of their
favourite food to survive and hand on their nature to a
posterity.

It was the same in the higher life of human self-
consciousness and will; only here intention and de-
liberateness entered in and turned mimicry into deceit.
Wherever hypocrisy existed it was a sure sign of a
vast number of incompetent and feeble, who made an
easy quarry to the villain, and of the vigour of a cun-
ning minority, who often found it difficult to entrap.
Diplomacy and convention are the deliberate mimicry
of the predatory section of a race or of its gullible sec-
tion. When once the L,imanorans had purged the
island of the liars, they had to prevent the propagation
of the feeble and incompetent; for they knew that, as
long as these existed in a community, there would per-
sist the more futile forms of deceit. After that first

Ethics 607

purgation, the weak, though retained in the island, had
to abandon family life; they were provided with the
means that made existence easy and pleasant in order
that they might not resort to their only method of sur-
vival; and in a generation the problem of hypocrisy
had disappeared.

It was then that the idrovamolan was invented and
came into use in education. Having driven out the
hated vice, they found that there was still the need of
impressing its evil results upon the minds of the matur-
ing youth, just as it was necessary even yet to study
the diseases that had disappeared for generations from
their midst in order to be able to cope with them,
should they ever be reintroduced through their com-
munication with other atmospheres. But they knew
the unreality of teaching anything in a merely theoreti-
cal way; they felt that lecturing and sermonising and
the mere reading of history would give them no such
grasp of the vice and its evils as would living, acting
things. The idrovamolan with its telescopic, telacous-
tic, and telemagnetic powers came to their assistance in
this difficulty. By its help parents and proparents
were able to bring the youths into the very presence of
the loathed deceit without submitting them to the
chance of contagion. They turned the object-tubes of
the wonderful instrument upon Aleofane and its so-
ciety; and through them they saw and heard and felt
men like insects mimic and like stinging worms crawl
and diplomatise, lie and cheat, still with the worship of
reality and sincerity and truth upon their lips. There
they noted the growth of the most offensive form of the
vice. The weak learned it for protection, flattering
the great and grovelling in the dust before them whilst
they cursed them in their hearts, and all in order that

6o8 Limanora

some favour might perhaps be flung like a bone to a
dog. Having learned the vicious art in this cringing
fashion, the feeble were seen to march off with the
proud gait and the conceit of adepts and use it like
brigands on the still feebler. This combination of in-
competence and unscrupulousness was the final curse
of a civilisation that had taken deceit to its bosom.
The whole of the energy of the race was spent in simu-
lation and dissimulation. Kvery vice simulated its
antagonistic virtue; even virtue simulated the vigour
and arrogance of vice. The L,imanoran youth needed
no more teaching on the evils of hypocrisy. They rose
from the idrovamolan with an intense loathing for all
forms of deceit, so impressive was the drama they saw
enacted in Aleofane. Even what seemed innocent mim-
icry they shrank from, seeing it universally employed as
the means of cheating in that island of liars ; mimicry
they were encouraged to eschew; for as surely as the art
was mastered, it was used for mean or foul purposes at
some time or other, either for envy and jealousy and
scorn, or in order to lay traps, sometimes for the strong,
but chiefly for the weak. Even in art all mimicry was
avoided, for there it betrayed feebleness or lack of in-
dividuality. The existence of mimicry in the animal
world was the mark of degeneracy upon terrestrial life.
It argued the wide domain of feebleness and rapacity,
and the dominance of the passion for mere existence.
Wherever it was wide-spread, it meant the abeyance of
progress and of eagerness for progress. Mimicry is the
sterilising process of faculty and power. Origination is
the principle of fertility, of stimulus to progress.

Whatsoever dallied with an outgrown principle or
element was immoral. Mere copying of what had
been already attained and was about to be left behind

Ethics 609

or used as a stepping-stone to something better was
neighbour to evil. Morality is the effort to adapt con-
duct and ideals to the new vistas opened up into the
future by an advance already achieved; and it is ever
being bribed or throttled by what is outworn. Evil is
the past which has become so obsolete and is yet so
living as to be obstructive. What has been outgrown
has ever its allies among living elements, and its advo-
cates in every mixed and unpurified race. Especially
is this the case where there are fixed codes or creeds,
and along with them professions organised to preserve
and continue their sway. The world is constantly see-
ing the spectacle of a nation or race or species coming
to a standstill after centuries of brilliant progress, and
getting fossilised in a certain stage of its advance;
there it remains for generation after generation as if
alive, yet practically dead for all purposes of develop-
ment, like a fly in amber. This dead stop is due to the
dominance of some code or creed that seemed to em-
body the spirit of its greatest success; the nation or
race sought to secure for ever to itself the advantages
of the ethical or spiritual methods that had achieved
for it its most brilliant results, by fixing them unalter-
ably for all time, with their official guardians to protect
them from change; so that which had given such vigor-
ous life and development for a time became a prison-
house and grave. Only the most tremendous revolution
and cataclysm could burst the walls of the tomb, tear
off its grave-clothes, and release its spirit for new con-
quests. Sometimes a nation seems to fossilise the creed
or polity that first gave energy to its life, yet at the
same time grows and develops spasmodically. It has
only made pretence of having fixed this code for all
time, whilst the living spirit of it escapes and follows

6 io Limanora

its own course in freedom ; it has periodically to return
to its pretended prison and tomb, and to reconcile by
Jesuitry and in makeshift way the two methods of life
which have come to differ so widely. Then it flees
again into the struggle of existence and gradually
ignores even the new versions of the old code, till the
divorce becomes too obtrusive to escape attention, and
the process of reinterpretation of the antiquated creed
begins again. This has been a common enough mode
of advance in the history of the world. But it is
fraught with incalculable risks. It induces a habit of
self-deceit and hypocrisy, and the nation or race ultim-
ately makes a tomb and prison-house for its spirit out
of its own falsities and self-delusions.

Advance like this, the Limanorans held, was no true
advance. They would have no part or lot in fixity of
methods or codes, for whatever became fixed grew
thereby evil and obstructed development and advance
to higher points of view. They had only to look into
their history to see how every new step antiquated some
universally accepted belief or maxim. Not so many
ages ago a crudely philanthropic spirit was considered
one of the surest signs of advancing virtue, in fact one
of the noblest of the virtues. Now it was considered
distinctly immoral to philanthropise without taking
care to foresee the results of the philanthropy. L/iman-
orans used to go out into the archipelagos and try to
convert the barbarians to the special code or creed
then in vogue. Instead of helping on the human race,
it actually stopped the development of a section of it;
for the adoption of a creed and its symbols and rites
and phrases far in advance of any possible civilisation
they could reach only made the savages— whose virtues

Ethics 6n

had hitherto been at least genuine — conventional, false,
and hypocritical; whilst the apostles left thousands of
their own countrymen at home stagnant or retrogress-
ive. It soon came to be acknowledged that inter-
course with inferior civilisations, even for the purpose
of raising them, lowered the moral standard of the
missionaries, whilst failing in its original motive.
Much of the philanthropy that began at home was
found to be no less obstructive and immoral. It fed
and clothed the poor and improvident, and thus helped
to slay and bury the only habit that could save them
out of their slough, the habit of measuring every step
they took, and seeing whither it led; and it helped to
perpetuate the evil; for the ready yet limited supplies
combined with the improvidence to make them breed
like the lower animals, and the race of paupers and
unprogressive was inordinately multiplied. The same
feeble and immoral philanthropy opposed all attempts
to stop the multiplication of the diseased and semi-
criminal, and had to increase the armies of doctors and
guardians of the peace every generation. It did well
to nurse the feeble in mind and body, and to reduce
the penalties under which heredity had placed them;
but it failed to see that it was doing endless evil by
letting them penalise an increasing posterity with their
own punishment. Not till it was branded as the worst
of immoralities was such philanthropy ended. This
had been a distinct advance and a true virtue, when
it had taken the place of cruelty and neglect, and when
there was unmeasured space on the earth for the ex-
pansion of population; but, once this stage had been
passed, and the purgation crusade was proceeding, it
became a real plague and vice.

Another immorality that had once been a virtue was

612 Limanora

the pursuit of beauty for its own sake. Men gave up
their lives to the production of beautiful things which
served no other purpose than their own glory and the
entertainment of idle and leisured people. Others made
fortunes and devoted them to the purchase of such
works of art, in order that crowds might collect and
admire them, and for a time there was something of
truth in the assertion that it educated the taste of the
people. But this was only when the bulk of the race
was unenlightened and unprogressive, and anything
that softened their barbarity, anything that drew their
thoughts away for even a brief time from sordid cares
or cruel projects or mechanical and conventional habits,
implied progress or a chance of progress. When the
race had been purified, and every eye was bent on the
future, and every nerve strained toward some advance
in human civilisation, beautiful things became the
commonest features and necessities of life, and beauty
ceased to be noticed as anything remarkable. Then
to spend energies on producing what was artistic and
beautiful without serving any other purpose than pleas-
ing was reckless extravagance, and by wasting what
should have been expended upon the progress of the
race was condemned as immoral. There was no vir-
tue in doing what everyone did by instinct. There
was positive vice in making it the sole and deliberate
purpose of expenditure of energy.

Another instance of a former virtue having become a
vice was statesmanship and political patriotism. At
one time half the conspicuous talent of the race went
in this direction, so greatly was it admired. And,
when there were other races and nations to diplomatise
or struggle with, and one half of the race had to pro-
vide for or keep watch on the other half, it is no strange

Ethics 613

thing that to enter into the domain of politics was con-
sidered the noblest thing a man could do, and love of
the welfare of the country was considered the noblest
sentiment a man could entertain. The most difficult .
problems, involving, some of them, the very continu-
ance of the race, occupied the attention of the states-
man and politician; what to do with the vast pauper
class and the still vaster fringe of the poverty-stricken
and improvident, how to deal with the criminally in-
clined, how to educate the half-savage denizens of
hovels in cities and even in the open country, how to
prevent the deadlocks in industry, how to regulate the
labour market and how to check the recurrent plagues
and famines, were questions that tasked the finest in-
tellectual energies of the nation. What complicated
the answer was the fact that the themes of the discus-
sions, the pauper, the criminal, the improvident, the
employer, the labourer, the plague-stricken, and the
starving had all a share in the government of the coun-
try, and had to be persuaded that any scheme proposed
was to their individual interests. The virtue of poli-
tical patriotism was streaked with loquacity, conceit,
self-seeking, hypocrisy, corruption, and intrigue, long
before it came to be recognised as a vice. The states-
man and politician had to make his principles as inter-
changeable as his coats, had to be a master in the art
of making the worse appear the better reason, had to
be skilful in lying without seeming to lie, had to rob
whilst putting on the guise of self-sacrifice, had to
cringe and fawn, bully and overbear, by turns, had to
be an artist in bribing men and in taking bribes, in
short had to be the most expert of the criminal classes.
By the time the end came, none in the list of virtues
had become so like a vice as patriotism. The great

6 14 Limanora

purgations swept out all occasions for politics and
patriots in exiling all the subjects of statesmanship.
Where there were no paupers or criminals, no masters
or servants, no uneducated or savage except young
children, and no chance of plague or famine, the oc-
cupation of the statesman and politician vanished.
Where every man was taught to be a law to himself,
legislation had no place. The problems of most in-
choate civilisations had gone into exile with all the isms
that were proposed to solve them, and all the charlatans
that proposed their solution. Patriotism was now, like
breathing, the organic and unconscious process of every
mind, and not the exception upon which anyone could
plume himself. No longer was it the safety of the
country, or the continuance of the race, or the susten-
ance or justice or criminality of part of the people that
demanded conscious effort, but the advance of the
human system in all. To propose and argue legislative
schemes for the benefit of any section of the race would
have been accounted immorality, if it had not been
taken as a symptom of atavism or mental disease. A
hospital was the certain fate of anyone who indulged in
political projects or political eloquence; the old virtue
had passed beyond the stage of obstructiveness and
vice, and had become one of the tests of insanity.

This disease of politics rarely appeared except
amongst the youthful and immature and the methods
of driving out the evil spirit had recently grown scien-
tific and unfaltering. The old plan of exiling, it was
now felt, had become cruel and pitiless. For in recent
generations the pace of evolution in the race had so
quickened that now even its laggards and the breakers
of its moral law were centuries ahead of the most ad-
vanced citizens of the most advanced nations on the

Ethics 615

face of the earth; and no longer could they, if expatri-
ated, find any to consort with. They would have to
live with men who, in their eyes, were vicious and
criminal. Noola had been the last to be exiled; the
system was finally abandoned as inhumane and un-
scientific; and science soon found methods of treatment
that were prompt and efficient in their cure of all such
mental diseases.

My final instance of the old virtue grown vice is of a
different kind. It belonged more to the intellectual
sphere than to the practical, and seemed to me at first
rather a mistake than a defect of the nature. It was
the common error of taking a verbal originality or ad-
vance for a real, a mere change of name for a change
in essence. In the old times it had been counted as a
great merit to a man, if he manufactured a new nom-
enclature for any wide spread phase of civilisation, and
so gave the race the sensation of dealing with some-
thing novel. Some of the greatest heroes of philosophy
and science in the pre-purgation ages of the island had
owed their fame to the substitution of fresh phraseology
for what had grown outworn and trite, and most of the
great writers had done nothing more for their fellows
than re-illumine a linguistic world fallen dull and dark.
Men grow sick of ideas that have worn the same verbal
dress for a generation or more, and hail as a discoverer
and benefactor anyone who tricks them out anew; they
delight in feeling them to be familiar old friends, whom
they have to make no mental effort to know. Even to
dye the old garments in new imaginative tints is a
service they will not readily forget; whilst the great
discoverers and pioneers of the human race have had
years or ages of oblivion according to the newness and
difficulty of their ideas and the distance beyond the

616 Limanora

common horizon they have looked into the future.
The L,imanorans of old, like most other men, abhorred
having to think out again their creeds and ideas, and
especially having to reform them; and so they stood
out lustily against every real advance proposed, and
shouted it down as irreverence or blasphemy in over-
turning the old barriers and old altars. The maker of
a new nomenclature and the tinter of the old phrase-
ology pandered to this intellectual indolence.

One of the most striking results of the new point of
view after the great purgation was the transformation
the fame of these old scientists and philosophers and
writers suffered. They began to be execrated as
dealers in illusions, as men who fed the passion of the
human race for stagnance or retrogression to monstrous
proportions. They were thrown down from their lofty
pedestals, and cast into oblivion for their sins against
truth and reality. To seduce men from the pursuit of
truth by mere verbal jugglery was now counted no
mere mistake, bjut a heinous offence against morality.
To take as a real discovery what was but a new name
or set of names revealed a vicious obliquity of mental
vision, that needed attention from the ethical phy-
sicians. This was especially easy in the domain of
ethics, and the L,imanorans were constantly on their
guard against the delusion of accepting a change of
nomenclature as a moral advance. The elders carefully
reviewed every stage of progress, lest it should have
been in words and phrases. This was the main purpose
of the Manora and of the Imanora, and every month
linguistic councils were held to revise the language, and
to throw out any fallacies and illusions it might har-
bour. Every new nomenclature and phraseology was
searched and probed, and torn off the ideas that they

Ethics 617

were meant to express, in order to see if there was any-
thing new underneath them. Delusion, they had re-
solved, they would have nothing to do with in any
shape or form. For delusion blinded the eyes to the
route they were taking, and made them march in a
circle or back over the old roads under the belief that
they were advancing to what was new. It was the
greatest foe to true progress, and any man who fell into
it revealed vicious tendencies, which needed the minis-
trations of the physicians and nurses in the ethical
sanatorium. To take verbal ingenuity for true pion-
eering was the most grievous offence against the
future of the race.

The great standard and test of morality was pro-
gress. How far will an act or habit aid the true de-
velopment of the race ? This was the crucial question
in Limanora; and in order that it might be answered
satisfactorily and easily by any member of the commun-
ity, the council of elders was careful to accommodate the
ideals of the race to every advance made. It had been
a rare thing in their history to change or add to the
cardinal instincts of morality. But this they knew was
by no means impossible; and indeed they were buoyed
up with the hope that the moral cosmos was still to
open up new marvels like the physical cosmos, that in
fact the two would ultimately be found to be one when
looked at from the final and divine point of view.
There was the strongest conservatism in the ethical
phase of life; for it is the last, highest, and most com-
plex development of vitality. The lower we investi-
gate in the animal world, the more revolutions and
transformations we see the individual go through, the
more enslaved is it to circumstances, to locality, to

618 Limanora

season, to the moment. The higher we go, the greater
we find the conservatism, and at the same time the
greater the origination and the adaptability. In man
these two conflicting powers grow stronger side by side
as he advances in civilisation. He retains features and
forms that are outworn and useless longer than most of
the higher animals; and yet he originates and adapts
himself and his surroundings with far more ease and
swiftness. In ethics, his last evolution, the conserv-
atism dominates the origination and the advance, ob-
scures them or makes them simulate its own features,
and produces the belief that the final maxims and cue
of morality have been reached from the first. Ethical
progress has naturally been slow, and it is only the
student of vast periods of history and of many nations
and races who becomes fully persuaded that there has
been any change in the point of view. Because there
is not complete transformation, as in the case of the
minuter and lower animals, it is assumed that there is
no evolution, and that morality and conscience have
remained fixed quantities, from the beginning of his-
toric times at least. And the close bond between ethics
and religion has assisted this dominant and delusive
conservatism in its task. Each great step in ethical
evolution has been claimed by religion as its own, and
as resulting from its own special revelation from
heaven.

The lyimanorans were quick to recognise that mor-
ality must be subject to growth and development, not
only in the individual, but in the race, and that man
must gain higher ethical points of view as he pro-
gresses. They knew that many of the finest impulses
and inspirations towards progress, and especially ethi-
cal progress, had come from beyond the earth and the

Ethics 619

earth's atmosphere. But that any age or race could
have caught the ultimate ethical light from the central
sun of the cosmos seemed to them after their experience
the height of absurdity. There could be no spiritual
eye trained and developed enough to receive it. As
the bodily eye of man is capable of taking in only a
limited range of rays of light, whilst an immense range
of them above and below its faculty either blind it or
pass unnoticed, so his spirit at any given stage of its
development can understand and accept ethical ideas
only within certain limits; but, as it progresses, it is
able to see beyond, and appreciate ideas that were
non-existent to it before. There is as much difference
between the ethical comprehension of the modern Lim-
anoran and that of the most highly civilised European
as between that of the latter and the savage's, or as be-
tween the savage's and the pig's; and if they could
have brought themselves to believe that they had at-
tained the fullest and the final light upon morality, the
thought would have struck their very hearts to stone.
It was this that kept them from formulating their
morality or ethics in any definite code. They knew
that a code would soon petrify morality and itself be-
come a fetich ignorantly worshipped, and, gathering to
it through the ages the self-interest of its officials and
the irrational devotion of its worshippers, attain a de-
spotism that could never be broken or controlled. A
code issues in a series of prohibitions which become a
boundless slavery, and prohibitions develop the sense
of rights which dominates and obscures all sense of
duties; this keeps men hanging between savagery and
true civilisation. The growing dominance of duty with
its complementary obscuration -of rights is the first
symptom of the approach of rapid ethical progress. To

620 Limanora

insist on one's rights imprisons the soul in the living
sepulture of selfishness. To think of one's duty is to
admit the self-revealing and future unmisting light of
self-sacrifice. Once prohibitions become the order of the
day, especially in a limited community, the spirit of
intolerance is abroad; every man yearns to confine his
neighbour and put him in moral and intellectual lead-
ing strings. The origin and meaning of the " Thou
shalt nots" are forgotten; the spirit of them dies rap-
idly, and the letter binds and petrifies the souls that
must obey them. Progress in ethics is finally stopped,
and it is accepted as a law of nature that there never
was any development of conscience and never can be
any other ethical point of view. Moral stagnance .is
taken as the rule of human life, and nothing short of a
new impulse from spheres outside the world can lib-
erate the race, thus blinded, from its vicious circle of
thought.

Advance of the human system to higher points of
view is in L,imanora the moral test and standard of
actions and conduct. In all that is, nothing has ever
died, nothing is dead; what seems dead and fixed for
ever in permanent form is suffering change as truly as
the flitting aurora of the north; the rock, that seems
the same in our old age as when we saw it in infancy,
is in process of transformation no less than we our-
selves are; it is made up of particles that are groups of
molecules; and these molecules, moving with varying
degrees of rapidity round and across each other's orbits,
consist themselves of still more minute atoms that are
but points of living energy. Send another form of en-
ergy, like heat, through this apparently torpid mass,
and it stirs palpably to our senses; what was dormant
to us before has awakened, and, as the supply of the

Ethics 621

foreign energy increases, the rock moves and changes
beneath our gaze; not that the long-torpid mass has
not an energy of its own ; it is a store of energy, every
atom of it waiting but for the touch of another kind to
awaken from its age-long sleep, and to send most of it
free and a step higher into the wandering sphere again.
The difference between solid and liquid and between
liquid and.gas is only a question of time. In the solids
the molecules take longer to move through the same
space than those of the liquid, which in their turn take
longer than those of the gas; for solids flow under the
influence of gravitation or other force just as truly as
liquids or gases flow.

It is the same with energies; one differs from another
in pace; time is the only essential difference between
them. The pace of vital energy is so distinctive in
its swiftness that it forms a new order of existence.
Thought is the swiftest of the vital energies that we
know, and to rise in the scale is to quicken the pace.
The civilised man thinks as much more rapidly than
the savage as the savage thinks more rapidly than the
mollusc, if the last may be said to think or feel at all.
And there are heights above existing human thought
for man to climb. Higher and ever higher the scale of
energies in the cosmos must go, till time becomes what
would seem to us but a vanishing point; immediately
above us lies the vital energy to which a thousand
years are but as a moment. To the microbe, if it could
think, human life would seem an eternity. To creative
thought, which is the Limanoran ideal, eternity, future
as well as past, is focussed into a moment.

Up through the scale of energy the whole cosmos is
ever climbing, with occasional lapses and falls, time be-
ing the only differentiating quality. To quicken the

622 Limanora

pace of development is the one immediate aim of L,im-
anoran civilisation, and the morality of an action is
measured by its contribution to this aim. The higher
they climb, the nobler, the more ethereal, becomes their
energy; the less governed and clogged by animal con-
ditions, the more easy to quicken the pace of develop-
ment. For the cosmic law of influence is that the
closer in quality and degree the spheres of energy, the
more likely is the higher to mould the lower and raise
it near to its level. The source of the everlasting
movement and life in the cosmos is the unstable equi-
librium of all nuclei and stores of energy. Every
world differs from every other world in its capacity for
various forms of energy; and so does everything in it
differ from everything else in the amount of any par-
ticular form of energy it can contain. Comparative
proximity sets up a current between any two nuclei
of energy that thus differ. Whenever the two reach
stable equilibrium, that is, whenever they come to have
equal shares of the energy, the current of influence
ceases, and they are dead to each other. The socia-
listic ideal is political and social death; when all the
members of a community are equal and alike in their
share of its privileges and products and capacities, its
rights and duties, it ceases to grow or develop; stagna-
tion is the law of its being, especially if there are no
neighbouring communities differing from it on which
it can react. The lyimanorans deliberately strove to
keep up and strengthen the differences between not only
families, but individuals, in rights, duties, capacities,
aims. The differences were an everlasting fountain
of renewing life. The law of political and social life is
exactly the same as that of gravitation and of all the
other cosmic forces. Two sources of energy will con-

Ethics 623

tinue to influence each other, till they reach equality,
the greater giving of its share of energy a larger pro-
portion than the less. What keeps the cosmos eternally
alive is the complexity of the mutual influences.
There are no two bodies or centres of an energy so iso-
lated or so simply constituted as to remain for ever
dead or unchanging, once they have reached stable
equilibrium towards each other in respect to their
special form of energy. And so it is with men; the
socialistic ideal is an impossibility in this universe.

In the human sphere this cosmic law has farther-
reaching issues than the merely political. The L,im-
anorans were willing to do much for the advance of
mankind, but they had come to see that apostolism is
a case of this law of mutuality of influence as truly as
any other phenomenon; the higher must not only give
voluntarily of his influence and character to the lower,
but the lower must give of his to the apostle; and if the
proximit}r continues long enough, this mutual give-
and-take will end in the missionary coming nearer to
the original moral standard of the convert than the con-
vert comes to his patron's original standard. Where
the grades of the two civilisations are widely separated,
though the process of assimilation may be long, ex-
tended over even many generations, it will be most dis-
astrous to human progress. It is better, they concluded
from their long experience, to isolate an advancing race
that is far ahead of all other races, and thus to give it
the chance of coming within the sphere of still higher
intelligences.

Most advanced religions have begun with the impulse
towards this, yearning for a loftier sphere than that
in which they are hedged. They try to isolate their

624 Limanora

followers from the lowering influences of the world
around, in order that they may reach the ideal and
influence that are just above them. But, as they
apostolise and expand, the worshippers become mere
parasites of their God; they try to batten upon Him
with their lower natures, and thus drag Him down to
their level. After the first noble impulse and inspira-
tion, it is seldom that a religion does not become as
truly an instance of parasitism as the meanest bacterial
life. The lower all through the universe is eager to
parasite on the higher; minute organisms try to lodge
in the tissues of those that are larger and more de-
veloped. As long as host and parasite can pursue their
functions unhindered by their intimate relationships,
little harm is done; but as soon as the debris of the
lower clogs the organs of the host, what we call disease
results and the minute guest becomes a hurtful para-
site. As long as the religious impulse sends the nature
higher on the path of development, so long does it give
of its best to the Deity, so long does it fail to clog the
advance of the cosmos. But when it extends its con-
quest to mean and unprogressive natures, the common,
unenthusiastic natures that are saturated with envy
and jealousy, then does it become mere parasitism;
the religion has grown into a disease. The warm, hu-
mane, and generous natures which are touched by a
new inspiration, rise to an exceptional pitch of fervour
under its influence, and develop at a pace that stirs the
alarm and envy of their neighbours; whilst the result-
ant persecution continues unabated, there can be no
degeneration, the worship can never be parasitic. But
as soon as the persistence and progress of the early wor-
shippers and their propagandist enthusiasm begin to
invite the commonplace, cowardly spirits of the mass,

Ethics 625

who can never appreciate what is above them except to
envy it and drag it down to their level, its era of devel-
opment is past. The cosmic law of reciprocity never
fails to act, and the united influence of the meaner ma-
jority is greater in its power over the whole than the
fervour of the noble few; down falls the worship to the
level of the many.

It was on this cosmic law that the Limanorans based
their refusal to go out and attempt to convert and raise
the rest of mankind to their standard. They knew
from the nature of the universe that the attempt would
end in corrupting themselves and dragging them down
farther than they could drag up their converts. They
preferred to give of their best to the unorbed existence
which filled space outside of the world, and to make
their best still better. Thus they knew they were serv-
ing most truly the great end of all being, the develop-
ment of the cosmos, the elevation of the energy in it
towards more and more spiritual and progressive
grades. They strove to perpetuate and strengthen
their consciousness of what was above them, and to
break the yoke of the lower self, the self that at death
amalgamates with what is material and stagnant, al-
though the latter was needed as a stepping-stone as
long as they remained upon the face of the earth. In
seeking the proximity and influence of the higher en-
ergies and existences that seldom touched the earth,
they anxiously guarded themselves from all parasitism
which might drag these down in the scale of being;
and this led them to abandon attempts to personalise
the relationship to them. They would have no part
in worshipping or prostrating themselves before these
beings in order to obtain their protection and patron-
age; for this, they knew, becomes merely sectarian, the

4"

626 Limanora

outcome of envy and jealousy, the cause of bigotry and
intolerance, persecution and revenge. They did not
desire the exclusive influence of a higher being, nor to
become obstructions to its further development; to rise
to its level was their active spiritual ambition in striv-
ing to gain proximity to it.

As their senses, especially their inner senses, de-
veloped, they were getting more and more certain of
a vast universe of being just outside the merely ter-
restrial, and new inspirations and senses were ever
awakening in them; nobler ideas and impulses pressed
in upon them, they scarcely knew whence. They
were afraid to define the source, lest they should
humanise the idea of it and pollute it. What they
were sure of was that infinite space was filled with
unorbed life and energy, rising in higher and higher
grades, as it receded from the terrene. The energy of
the worlds and of the other nuclei of force was gradu-
ally rising through the grades of being, thanks chiefly
to the measureless existence which hovered round
them, yet settled upon no centre of fixed energy. Out
of this unorbed life came the impulses and inspira-
tions that made such epochs in the history of a world.
Their magnetic sympathy with this they were strength-
ening and elevating every generation, as they strove to
rise higher and higher amongst these existences in
order that into their spirits might come nobler and
nobler influences. As long as they were conscious of
qualities and degrees of existence above them, so long
would they be stimulated on their upward develop-
ment. They had no fear that they would ever reach a
point from which they could not see heights beyond.
That, they knew, would be complete spiritual death.
But they knew too that there was no such thing as

Ethics 627

death, or entire annihilation, in the whole cosmos.
What seemed to us death was but the final parting of
two grades of being or energy, the lower to coalesce
with some fixed form of energy and attach itself again
to some more rapidly developing form, the higher to
range itself with the unnucleated energies of space,
still to rise by proximity to some higher life. They
were scientifically certain that there could be no end
to this process of development upwards. Aspiration
was the duty and true function of all existence. To
quicken the pace of the evolution, to range themselves
more and more swiftly with the higher life of the cos-
mos, this was the prerogative of vital energy that had
gained consciousness of itself and its purpose.

Their conscience and morality were based upon this
quickening ascension. The test of an action was this:
does it help in raising the humanity higher in the scale
of being ? Nothing could be good that stopped their
ascent; nothing could be bad that compelled them to
rise more quickly. The elders generally saw at a
glance all the bearings of an act and knew whether it
contributed to this general aim or not. Where they
hesitated on account of the complexity of the problem,
they met and discussed it, calling in all the accurate
science they had to their aid; if after all they had to
lay the question aside unanswered, then was the act
left in that neutral zone of conduct which the Lima-
norans might or might not enter as they saw fit. Such
acts carried no moral discount or credit with them for
the time. But often the advance of an age, or even a
few years, would remove the act from the neutral zone
into the bad or the good; a higher point of view gen-
erally solved their doubt. From the opinion of the
elders there rayed out magnetically into the young and

628 Limanora

immature the sense of what was right, to act as con-
science where they were incapable of reasoning out the
position.

There was thus no feature of their lives but came
within the range of morality. Even the habitual and
automatic movements and actions, which form so large
a proportion of the life of the other terrestrial races
had been reduced to an almost inappreciable propor-
tion in theirs and were ever being questioned and
tested to see if they harmonised with the newer points
of view that had been reached. There was nothing in
their whole existence that had not its moral relation-
ships. Their sciences and arts, their experiments and
inventions, were as much a part of their moral life as
their character and their conduct towards each other.
Morality was the relationship to the ever-developing,
ever-advancing, aim of the race, and nothing in the
whole range of their life was indifferent to that.

CHAPTER XII

A WARNING

and again there overshadowed the spirit of
L, the race a cloud, a foreboding, that contrasted
deeply with their usual exhilaration. The intervals
between its appearances were often long, occasionally
brief. At first I could not understand the cause of it;
for I was still in pupillage and had not yet developed
the sympathetic magnetism that ultimately made me a
member of the race. But, when it recurred once or
twice, I began to see that it followed the passions of
Lilaroma; and that the families ot the L,eomo were least
affected by it and most active whilst it lasted. A nother
concomitance was the subsequent importance of the
questions connected with inter-stellar migration.

The discovery of the infinite and invisible life of
unorbed space, not only infinitesimal but highly or-
ganised, lessened the gloom of these beclouded periods,
and made the Limanorans less feverish in their astro-
nomic and volitational researches. They felt that the
divorce of the higher and lower energies of their
human system, commonly called death, was no annihi-
lation of their entity, no closure of their career of devel-
opment, but only an incident in it, that took the further
history of their higher energies out of the reach of the

629

630 Limanora

grosser terrestrial senses. They had no need, they
felt, to reach out frantically towards some other world.
They had lost all fear of death, and all thought of it as
the end of their evolution. Still upwards would they
climb through higher stages of existence, in spite of
the loss of that grosser stepping-stone which we call the
body. Knowing how full the interstellar infinities are
of vital energies and organisms, and knowing too how
the body began a new, though perhaps lower, career
at death, they were certain that the vitality and spiritual
energy that left it on dissolution, a far loftier and more
highly organised entity than the divorced terrene ele-
ments, would still exist and still develop. The whole
encyclopaedia of their scientific knowledge was opposed
to its annihilation, and the discovery of the vital ful-
ness of space left no other alternative than that it was
thither the spiritual energy of the human personality
escaped at death.

Yet there lingered a tinge of gloom at the time of
any overwhelming spasm in the heart of the great
mountain; and the Leomo bated not a jot of their ac-
tivity at such periods in combating the once-dreaded
catastrophe. For they had no definite knowledge of
the future pace of their evolution, once the two types
of energy in them should be divorced; and they had
as a firmly grasped fact their development as they ex-
isted upon their island, and the increasing swiftness of
its pace as the years went on. They had ever been a
people readier to accept a bird in the hand than two in
the bush, although they might be fairly confident of
their skill in bird-catching. This very preference for
facts had helped them to abandon the promises of faith
that their old religion had so lavishly held out to them,
and to accept the attitude of patiently waiting for light.

A Warning 631

So now, when their science had found the light and
they had every prospect of opening communication with
the intelligences that lived just outside of their unaided
ken, they would rather wait upon the solid earth till
they saw as solid fact to rest on in their flight from the
earth.

They were eager, therefore, to postpone for some
generations or ages yet the catastrophe they feared.
They had had far back in their history a dim sense of
the wrecking power of Lilaroma and its connection
with the volcanoes in their old antarctic home. Their
more recent earth-science had made the twilight pro-
phecy into a clear fact. In an early geological age of
the earth the continent round the south pole had sent
a broad outlier far north through the southern ocean;
it had indeed stretched close up to the equator. This
they knew as soon as they began to study the natural
history of Limanora and of the archipelago around it.
Not merely were the birds of the same or kindred
species with those of their old home, but many of them
had long preserved the memory of the former bridge
between the two ; as the ancient expedition that
brought the ancestry of the Limanorans sailed across
the intervening ocean, flights of the birds they were
familiar with were seen making for their new home,
and some of them fell on the decks or settled occasion-
ally on the rigging of their ships. Their unscientific
and superstitious ancestors took this as an omen of suc-
cess; they thought that these birds had been sent from
heaven to direct their course, and they steered straight
in the line of their flight. The successful result con-
firmed them in their superstition for many ages after
they had landed on their tropical isles.

But the careful observation and the science of later

632 Limanora

times cleared up the mystery. For a period they had
taken it as a proof of the similarity of nature all over
the world, when they found so much of the fauna and
flora like those of their old home. But at last it began
to strike cautious observers that certain birds disap-
peared during their summer season and reappeared in
their winter. Classification soon separated the migra-
tory from the localised, and the modifications of the
species that they had been accustomed to in their old
home from those that were quite new to them. This
passed from the birds to the other animals, and thence
to the flora. After the observer had done his work of
classifying all the animal and plant life, scientific
thought entered in and found the causes of both the
similarities and the dissimilarities between the new or
tropical and the old or antarctic. After many ages the
migration of birds lessened; for few returned in the
winter, and as the climate became cooler through pro-
cess of time, most species preferred to remain the sum-
mer long. Then, when an expedition went back to
the ancient home of the race in the south, all trace of
cultivation and cities had vanished underneath the
everlasting snows, and the southern summer was found
to be as severe as their ancient winter had been, The
increasing rigours of the new climate to the south had
reduced the mass of the bird-migrations.

The expedition followed the long-charted route of
the feathered travellers, and on its return sounded the
depths and tested the seas and their fauna the whole
way. When the investigators had reached the close of
their labours, it became patent to them that their voy-
age had been along the coast of a buried continent that
had had its northernmost point not far to the north of
L,ilaroma. Their soundings along the line of bird-route

A Warning 633

were ever the shallowest, and at points on it, if they
left its direction, they suddenly dropped into the
deepest of oceans. A mountain - range, sometimes
broken into immense precipices and forested along its
slopes, had evidently margined the lost continent on its
west and had stood the siege of the encroaching ocean
through geological ages, till the slow catastrophe of
subsidence had sent it under the victorious march of its
enemy. Here and there it left a barren rock or a vol-
canoed isle like a buoy to mark where its wreckage had
been submerged. Everywhere on the bird-line they
found a shallow-ocean flora and fauna; if ever they
sounded or dredged or fished or dived at any distance
from it, they passed into a deeply pelagic belt of life,
or rather belt of death.

It dawned upon them that their old home and their
new formed the extremities of the vanished continent,
and that their height was one of the consequences of
the submergence; the deeper the great submarine range
sank, the higher Lil aroma and the lofty torch-mount-
ains of their ancient home rose. But repeated visits
to their old snow-coffined land, and the expansion of
their earth science into an art, gave them farther-
reaching views of the causes of this vast subsidence.
The old bird-route was one of the most ancient fissure-
lines in the crust of the earth. Out of it along its
whole length had flowed in the earliest geological ages
the oozes of lava that formed the backbone of the old
continent as it rose from the sea, its most lasting bas-
tion against the encroachments of the watery element.
Here and there along the great chain of mountains, as
they rose denuded of their softer rocks and stood
wrinkled into canons and gorges by the rivers that
swept them clean, blazed at long intervals of time huge

634 Limanora

vents for the smouldering fires underneath. As the
mountain-barrier sank and the ocean flowed over its
forests that had graved, into the winged species the
memory of their ancestral feeding-grounds, and finally
closed all the breathing-spaces of the fiery Titan be-
neath, his passion sought vent more and more through
the torch- cones of the snow-buried southern land and
through the lofty crater of I/ilaroma. Expedition after
expedition to their ancient home revealed the simul-
taneity of volcanic action in the two regions; but the
greater the titanic paroxysms in the one, the less they
were in the other. They were the two pulses and
breathing-vents of the buried giant.

For many ages after some unknown submarine catas-
trophe had hedged them into their archipelago by the
untraversible mill-race and the dark belt of mist, they
had been unable to test the connection between their
own fire-mountain and those in their old home. But
they could easily imagine during the paroxysms of
L,ilaroma what was occurring far off in the southern
snows; and when they had mastered the art of aerial
flight, they resumed their expeditions to the glacial
regions of the south. Every few years might have
been seen, had there been mariners there to see them,
the strangest of all flying things, beings in human
form, winging their way through the air southwards or
northwards. At first the bands were large and well
equipped in order to guard against all risks. But in
time they grew bolder, and companies of half a dozen,
or even three or four, ventured on the long flight to the
south. At last the families of earth-scientists were en-
trusted with the task, and sent their messengers to re-
port on the conduct of the antarctic volcanoes.

These reported that, if ever those southern vents

A Warning 635

should close, no application of the art of Leomarie
could save Limanora, or indeed the archipelago around,
from disastrous explosion. The circular current with
its belt of mist had shown that this was the thinnest
crust and the weakest point on the whole line of fissure;
and if the sea broke into the volcanoes of the other ex-
tremity, the steam generated from the percolating water
would make for the archipelago and blow it to dust.
Recent messengers to the south had found dangerous
developments in the regions of snow and ice. Where
it lay in the line of the ancient fissure, the land was
rapidly subsiding; and that was exactly the locality of
the southern volcanoes. If the walls of their craters
should sink so low that the waters of the ocean could
make breaches in them, then would the final catas-
trophe occur to Limanora.

Whilst the last decennial review was proceeding, and
high hopes were rising in the breasts of all that a few
generations would see the race independent of the
fear of terrestrial cataclysms, their minds were jerked
from the future into the present. Our torch-cone sud-
denly broke into a great column of steam, and a fine
dust fell upon the island. There had been no prelim-
inary warning and little had been put in readiness, al-
though the Leomo had been uneasy for weeks as they
noticed the spasmodic action of their earth-sensors.
The heat and the magnetism in their lava-wells had
been rapidly changing their degree every few hours.
But this had occurred in previous periods without any
recorded effect above the surface of the earth. They
had therefore only kept more zealous watch without
resorting to more than the usual relieving action.

Now the whole people were called to their assistance,
and the concentrated power of Ritula was turned on to

636 Limanora

the boring of vents. On every side of Ularorna leo-
morans were busy, and soon the imprisoned lava and
steam escaped by a thousand exits. But a new method
was adopted by the Leomo. They shipped in huge
faleenas of the newest and most powerful type a
number of earth-perforators, and along with them a
large quantity of machinery that would enable them
to use the wasting energies of the southern elements.
Amongst others Thyriel and myself had to manage
and steer one of the great aerial cars, for it was chiefly
members of the Leomo that manned the expedition.

High we rose above the archipelago, before we at-
tempted to cross the mist-ring. Below us we could see
the Limanoran houses and buildings gleam rainbow-
hued like bubbles on the beach of an ocean. Higher
still, and the various isles of the archipelago crept closer
together in the perspective, a handful of emeralds cast
upon a plain of azure. Our eyes wandered over the
scene and saw how it was set in its dull-white milky
ring, a narrow and impenetrable hedge that cut this
little world off from the sight of its fellows upon earth.

Through a cloud we shot that drenched and freshened
our gleaming car, then followed the fleet southwards
across the circular thread drawn round the nest of
islets. We were out in the wider spaces of the world
again, and our home receded into a speck on the hori-
zon. Over the waste of waters we sped, a great grey
plain flecked with white. At first I lost my cool con-
fidence in this trackless wilderness; but fearlessness re-
turned to me as I saw the face of Thyriel bent now on
the Limanoran modifications of the compass, and again
on the rest of the fleet to the right and left of us. The
lumona or sun-compass and the ularema or sun-chart
were our trusty guides by day, even if we had lost sight

A Warning 637

of our companions at any time; our track had been
marked out for us on our sun- chart of the heavens and
we could not fail to know where we were, even if clouds
should obscure the face of the great orb. If only a
few straggling rays managed to reach the face of the
instrument, indistinguishable though they might be
to our sense of warmth or of light, they affected its
delicate apparatus; it told us their exact direction and
angle, whilst another face told us the exact point of
the day, and of the north and south line. There was
needed no calculation to find the region where we were,
the lumona did it for us; and it kept tracing our course,
as we accomplished it, by means of an indicator on our
ularema or day-chart.

Once I had been instructed by Thyriel in the man-
agement and guidance of the air-ship, she lay down to
rest ; and I was alone beneath the oppressive paleness
of the vault. I dared not look over the side lest the
sight of the grey wilderness far below me should make
my head swim. Only once did I look up; and the
sense of limitlessness numbed me. Now and again I
glanced quickly at the rest of the fleet. But I was too
fearful lest something should go wrong to turn my eyes
away from the tracer of the lumona as it moved upon
the sun-chart, or to take my nerve- power from my
hands as they grasped, the right the governor of our
flight-power and the left the rod of the steering-gear.
As the hours flew and nothing untoward occurred, I re-
laxed the tension of my system and enjoyed the glide
of the ship and sang to the beat of its wings. The
sense of solitude passed as I felt the magnetic sympathy
of my comrades in the other cars thrill me and my
spirits rose with the exhilaration of the heights through
which we travelled.

638 Limanora

The sun had reached the western round of the sea,
and swelled into a vast ball of fire. Thyriel awoke as
his rim dipped into the ocean and at once prepared for
a change of methods. She taught me how to turn on
the power of the engine into the rows of huge lamps
that were meant to search the darkness of the night.
Then she brought out the alumare or star-compass and
substituted it for the lumona; she removed the day-
chart and put in its place the manularema or night-
chart, adjusting the indicator of the star-compass to its
tracing.

Night fell and brought out the lamp-jewelled sides
of the other air-ships. They looked like a fleet of
gigantic glow-worms sweeping through the air. What
we showed like to any wandering ship on the ocean be-
neath us it is difficult to imagine. I myself had tra-
versed those solitary levels in the Daydream, and I tried
to think how I could have explained the strange phen-
omenon had I seen it from my deck. The superstitious
amongst my sailors might have taken it for a portent,
some as one from heaven, others as one from hell.
The scientific would have concluded it to be a series of
fireballs travelling before an upper current of the
winds. I should have recorded it in my note-book
among the observations of meteors and other similar
phenomena, and have waited further illumination. By
day we were too high to attract the attention of anyone
but the investigator of cloud-changes and weather-
signs, and we saw no sign of human life during our
long aerial voyage to the south. But away beneath us
we could just descry floating brown specks swiftly trac-
ing their zigzag course over the grey plain and knew
them for the broad-winged albatrosses, whose flight the
L,imanorans had so carefully studied for the construe-

A Warning 639

tion and navigation of their faleenas. For by an auto-
matic arrangement which brought the currents of the
wind to bear upon the steering-gear, our car now grace-
fully rose, and again as gracefully fell when the wind
was against it, now swept to this side, now glided to
that. All that I had to think of was the main course.
On a later voyage even the steersman was superfluous,
except in a storm or violent change of winds; for a chart
was invented on which the course of the voyage was
traced in the shape of a metal groove, and in this the
end of the steering-rod was made to move. The two
automatic movements governed the manipulation of
the winds and the course of the car. It was the same
with the engines that achieved the beat of the wings;
the slightest change in the opposing medium commun-
icated itself to the electric power and modified it. All
that was needed from the occupants of the faleena was
a little attention now and again to see that the ma-
chinery was working smoothly and solidly, and to en-
sure that the steering-rod adjusted itself to the caprices
of the wind.

On this, our first long aerial expedition, one of us
had always to be at the helm, although I found after
a few watches that there was needed but little ten-
sion either of muscle or nerve to keep the ship to her
course. Thyriel took the first half of the night and
of the day, and I took the other two sections. When
I awoke in the middle of the first night and took
my place at the helm, the sight bewildered and dazed
me; I felt as if I had gone back again into the region
of dream. The stars seemed to throb close in upon
me; I felt as if in a cosmic confessional with myriads
of world-eyes wide open to see into my heart. I was
not afraid; yet my veins throbbed in awe before this

640 Limanora

palpitation of the cosmos. But I settled down to my
task and grew conscious of the surrounding fleet of fire-
flies, that even at their great distance from me numbed
my eyes with the flash of their lamps and paled the
light of the stars. Beneath me, as I looked over the
bulwark, there was nothing but the solid blackness of
midnight; never had I felt so isolated. Thoughts
wove as unceasingly in my brain as the wing-beats
wove upon the loom of night. Now and again was I
stirred from my meditation by the swoop of our faleena
as it breasted some great billow of wind. So precip-
itous were some of those waves that my heart leapt in
my bosom, as we rose before them or slid down them.
I never passed a night of such intensity of exhilaration
and thought. There was my lifelong comrade peace-
fully sleeping as I watched; the infinities above mag-
netised me with their sympathies, as their eyes searched
me to the heart; below me the midnight brooded si-
lently over what I knew to be the untracked ocean.

Day after day, night after night, we sped on, the air
growing rapidly colder, till, for the sake of my unadapt-
able system, we drew the transparent oval roof over the
faleena and fixed the radiator which kept the tempera-
ture at an even level. Thereafter the stars were not so
omnipresent in their gaze; there was more of a limit to
the space in which we dwelt; and the movements of
the faleena impressed themselves less upon my senses.

At last as my watch was ending one moonless night
I could see a dim flare in the southern sky which I took
for the aurora australis. But when Thyriel gazed at it
and then at the agitation of the fireflies abreast of us,
she knew it was the reflection of the great antarctic
torch-mountains. I rose at dawn and could see be-
low us the white glacial cliffs of the polar continent.

A Warning 641

Thyriel seemed stirred by some emotion that I was ig-
norant of, but soon knew to be the recognition of the
original home of her race; there seemed to move in her
blood the ancestral yearning for the land from which
they had come. She did not shrivel up in the excess-
ive cold as I did, but looked forward with ecstasy to
moving amid the snow and the ice, though she had seen
little of them in her own short life except around the
crater of L,ilaroina.

Bred though I had been in the rigorous winters of
Scotland, I could not bear the bite of the wind and had
to put on one of their cold-repelling garments. This
consisted of two layers of flexible irelium-woven cloth,
one of which was a conductor of electricity and the
other a resister of it. The outer or conducting layer
was connected with some labramor which carried a
store of electricity and this combination produced a
warm, healthful glow all round the body. I had gloves
and cap and mask of the same construction and, when
fully equipped, I could defy the most bitter cold that
the upper atmosphere of the earth ever experienced.

With this armour on I looked forward with delight
to our sojourn in the region of snow and ice as I
watched our approach to the rough ocean-like surface
of the new country. For Thyriel took the helm, now
that there was needed more delicate manipulation of
the faleena, and I stood in the bow and gazed at the
rest of the fleet rising and falling on the wind-waves.
Now and again I interpreted a signal from the faleena
of the guiding elder, whilst my comrade was busy
adapting the course to the caprices of the wind. But
as a rule her own magnetic sense was alert enough to
know what were the intentions of the other air-ships.

Round the group of great fire-cones we coasted,

642 Limanora

keeping clear of their smoke-brush and dust- vomit; for
the wind was off the land and bore their ejections miles
out to sea and high into the air. Across the icy plains,
ridged and hummocked by pressure from the higher
land beyond, we flew, once rising high enough to get
a glance over the passes of the great mountain-barrier,
whence the torrents of ice slowly found their way to
the coast. Beyond I could discern, even with my
undeveloped eye-power, level plains stretching to the
horizon, plains which indicated water underneath; and
upon them the direction of the furrows and hummocks
revealed whither the mass of the sea beneath flowed to-
wards some narrow exit, overlapping and play ing leap-
frog in its eagerness to escape the pressure from
behind.

But the habits of this almost land-locked sea had no
immediate interest for us, and we soon turned and made
before the wind for a valley that lay sheltered between
the mountain - chain and the group of torch - cones.
Within a brief time we had all our faleenas secured,
and the multitudinous rings of the leomorans they
carried deposited in caves ready for the coming opera-
tions. Then the elder who led the expedition took his
air-ship, and with it we saw him circle round the indi-
vidual volcanoes and reconnoitre the inroads of the sea.
He had, we knew, already seen the dangerous prox-
imity of one new crater to the low coast that divided
the group of fire-hills from the galloping waves.

Manifestly expedition was demanded. For he re-
turned with great swiftness; and all was soon bustle
and preparation in the camp, although it had settled
down for a rest. The word was passed round that, if
the wind changed and whipped the racing billows to
their raid, a high tide might find its way into the new

A Warning 643

crater and undo the local work of Limanoran civilisa-
tion. The fleet was at once in the air with the engines
ready to be placed; and within two hours the winds
and the waves, the magnetism of the earth, and the
electricity of the air had been yoked to the great
power-machines. Then the rings of the leomorans
were attached, and the stores of energy brought to
bear on them; before long we could see at a dozen
different points high up the side of the cone brushes of
black smoke bending before the wind. Between the
new low crater and the old lofty one a score of new
vents for the explosive energy of the fires underneath
had been worked into the crust of the earth ere the
wind had changed round into alliance with the waters.
The molten rock which had oozed from the dangerous
cone at the edge of the sea had sealed its mouth before
the ocean leapt into it. In order to make the seal more
secure a sluggish river of lava was directed down the
slope from several leomorans, and sent over the lips of
the exposed crater. After every sign of the offending
cone but a low hummock had disappeared under the
molten invasion, bastions were drawn all along the
coast beneath it in the manner familiar to L,imanora.

When this fortification of the mountain was finished
and the strain upon our muscles and nerves, and espe-
cially upon our eyes, was relieved, we had leisure to
look about us. The sight that met our view, as we
looked down the slopes of the mountain, was deeply
impressive. The flow of the red-hot rock from the
mouths of our lava- wells had melted the glacial concre-
tions for hundreds of yards beyond the margins of the
molten currents, and laid bare the ruins of a great city
that had evidently been buried in ice and snow since
the lowering of the temperature had made the climate

644 Limanora

unbearable by men of civilised nurture and habits.
The steam rising from the neighbourhood of ice and
fire had covered the disentombed secret from our vision
whilst we were working, and as the wind fell that had
swept the veil aside for a moment, the marvellous sight
was again curtained over, and we began to think that
it had been but a waking dream.

Some days after, when the lava had sufficiently
cooled to leave portions of the defrosted slope open to
the light of heaven, we revisited the scene. Several
broad streets and great squares had been unburied ; and
the architecture revealed how artistic and how ad-
vanced in mechanical contrivances the people that built
them had been, A thick covering of volcanic dust and
ash had plastered them over, so that it was difficult to
move on foot amongst the ruins now that the moisture
of the melting ice had mingled with it. After clearing
the debris from the doors we entered some of the houses
that had not lost their roofs, and there was evidence of
hasty flight; on the floors and couches were strewn
pellrnell the contents of boxes and cupboards and ward-
robes, half of them still stiff with the ice that the ad-
jacent streams of lava had been unable to melt. The
evacuation of this luxurious city had evidently occurred
during some great outburst of the volcano which had
threatened its existence. But the climate had grown
rigorous before the catastrophe; for in every house and
every room there were elaborate apparatus for heating,
and most of the clothing lying about was of fur or of
thick, warm stuffs, and when we dug beneath the coat-
ing of volcanic ash, we found in places accumulations
of ice which must have taken years to freeze. Layer
after layer of dirt and rubbish had been embedded by
the preservative frost; and, had we cared to cut through

A Warning 645

the stratified ice, we might have counted the years, or
perhaps centuries, through which this heap had ac-
cumulated.

For several visits we could find no human body,
though we came across one or two carcasses of emaci-
ated animals that had evidently lived amongst the ruins
till the last vestige of fodder had disappeared under the
volcanic layer or the accumulating ice. But at last in
a back lane, probably inhabited by slaves, we pene-
trated into a low house whose roof had crashed in under
the weight of the falling dust, and there we saw a scene
that moved us to tears. The mummied body of a little
child prepared for burial lay upon a bier and over it
was stretched the corpse of the mother; she could not
tear herself away from the last relics of her dead baby,
and in returning to rescue it, or to weep over it, had
been overwhelmed by the falling roof; the frost of cent-
uries had kept off the finger of decay, and this Niobe
and her child had remained like sculptured stone. We
covered the bodies gently with the volcanic mud there
as they lay, and left the frost to work its petrifaction
again, for we had not the heart to disturb the scene.
Here amongst the proletariate of this luxurious people
there was evidence of that maternal transport which
had showed the path of ethical development and exal-
tation to the Limanorans, and was destined to raise the
energies of our world into higher and higher forms.
This, we knew, was but the terrestrial type of an al-
truistic law which was working throughout the cosmos,
and making every centre of energy that had more than
the average give of its more to those centres that had
less.

All in our power was now done to relieve the press-
ure of the subterranean fires that were threatening

646 Limanora

to burst the ancient fissure; and all too that could be
done to ward off the batteries of the ocean. Then were
we sent in different directions to inspect and report on
the state of the ice-cliffs that beetled over the waves.
We hovered for days about the rocks and their glaciers
and the universal observation was that the coast was
rapidly subsiding; since the last visit of the L,imanoran
messengers its line had sunk many yards; marks that
had been made far above the reach of the waters were
now washed by the break of the higher billows. Thy-
riel and I were sent to a loftier bluff which extended
for almost a mile between shelving beach and shelving
beach just underneath the site of the buried city.

After inspecting the higher parts of it for days and
measuring the height of the old marks above the
farthest reach of the waves, a windless day, on which
the ocean lay as if frozen, gave us opportunity of fol-
lowing the cliff at its lowest sea-margin. For half a
mile or more nothing exceptional met our eyes. Then
suddenly we came upon a great chasm in the rock
where a soft intermediate stratum had mouldered away
into sand before the everlasting battery of the waves.
Over it a great dome of ice was stretched, which was
ever being thickened by the climbing spray of the bil-
lows as they broke into it. The entrance into this cave
was somewhat low and narrow, and a jagged rock in
the centre of it churned the angry waters into milky
foam. We saw that this feature would make the open-
ing invisible under its veil of spray on all but days of
perfect calm.

We were afraid to enter lest the sea should rise and
imprison us, so we called some comrades to our aid, and
they brought a light faleena that was made to serve
the double purpose of air-boat and water-boat. Then

A Warning 647

Thyriel took flight from above, and with the impetus
we bore ourselves and the boat through one of the pas-
sages past the jagged tooth of rock. As we settled
upon our faleena and looked up, the sight that met our
eyes took our breath away. The sun was shining brill-
iantly, lighting up the dome of ice with such power as
to make its whole thickness transparent. Through it
in every direction thick as motes in a sunbeam were
strewn human bodies, wrapped and mummied as in
death. Some lay on their sides with the head pillowed
on the arm; and as the face was uncovered, we could
see the features as clearly as if we stood in the chamber
where they lay. The frost had kept the flesh and the
tints of it uncorrupted. We could almost have sworn
that they breathed as they slept, yet in the case of most
it must have been the sleep of thousands of years.

This was the cemetery of that ancient people which
had built the city lately found. Doubtless this ice-
crust in which their graves had been cut had once
stood securely miles away from the coast; and in it
they thought that their dead would be safe for all time.
But, as the shore sank, the glacial crust ceased to be
a plain and slid downwards along the increasing slope
to the ocean ; and, before many years could pass, this
hyaline resting-place of the dead would be launched
into the sea and be swept by the storms and tides into
warmer airs and currents, which would release the
bodies from their beautiful petrifaction, and give their
elements to the ravening powers of the waters, or the
microscopic corruption of invisible life. In fact on our
return voyage we flew over several icebergs that were
floating catacombs. On the surface of one we discerned
the pallor of a mummied face, just released by the
strong rays of the sun from its ancient rigidity, and the

648 Limanora

still stony garments shining through their pellucid
covering.

We could almost decipher through the milky blueness
of the ice-dome, when the sun shone most brightly, the
inscriptions on the tablets lying beside these forgotten
dead. But the winds began to dirge within this
strange diaphanous mausoleum ; and even the waters
seemed to move around the cave with suppressed sob.
We thought the sounds ominous, and, rising high up
into the roof of the cave, close to the dead that had slept
there so like life for so many centuries, we poised our-
selves and, taking aim, dashed through the narrow en-
trance, while our comrades without drew the faleena
out by the cord with which they had held it securely.
Later in the day, as the calm continued, the guiding
elder sent others into the cave and they secured one of
the most elaborately hieroglyphed tablets. Those of
us who had most recently studied in the valley of
memories were able to trace much resemblance between
the language of the inscription and the ancient Lima-
noran tongue; and when we returned to our island, it
afforded one of the clues by which we were able to
unravel the history of this ancient antarctic people.
They were the descendants of those whom the north-
wards migration had left to their fate amid the growing
rigours of the southern winter. After the departure of
these who founded the colonies of Riallaro and became
the ancestry of the Limanorans, the wealthier classes
had evidently abandoned themselves to pleasure and
luxury within their splendid and superheated dwell-
ings, whilst the proletariate, though growing more
vigorous, and venturing far out upon the ice and the
ocean on fishing and furring expeditions, fell deeper
and deeper into the contempt of semi-slavery. Loyalty

A Warning 649

to their masters and ignorance still kept them unrebel-
lious in their growing embrutement, till the volcanic
catastrophe solved the problem of their future relation-
ships. Whither the survivors had gone, when the out-
burst of the subterranean fires drove them forth, no one
could say ; doubtless the peasant fishermen and hunters
took the effeminate caste in their rough boats over the
sea to some warmer climate; probably, if the expedi-
tions survived the storms and billows of the broad ocean,
they landed on the coasts of South Africa or on those
of South America and introduced an alien civilisation
and more complicated problems amongst the primitive
peoples of those isolated regions.

Before we left, we had to investigate the shores of
the inland sea for evidence of subsidence, resting on
them for a period whilst we punctured the slopes of the
mountains, in order to give a new direction to the
pressure of the fires upspringing from below. When
all the leomorans that were needed had been placed in
position and got into working order, not more than half
of the expedition were required to attend to them.
The others, and amongst them Thyriel and myself,
were allowed to wander over the shores of the gulf or
sea, everywhere finding abundant evidence that the
whole neck of land which divided it from the ocean,
high though it still was in the lofty mountain-barrier,
was rapidly subsiding, and would ultimately succumb
to the batteries of the besieging elements. This might
take many centuries, but that the huge volcanic range
would be submarine within measurable time was ob-
vious. Had the rate for even a decade of years been
constant, we could easily have calculated the number
of centuries that would elapse before the great catas-
trophe; but the amount of subsidence varied from

650 Limanora

period to period, increasing and then decreasing. The
most alarming change had occurred since the last visit
of the Leomo to their old home. Square miles that
had been low-lying land some few years before were
now encrusted with marine ice; and lofty precipices
were perceptibly lower.

The most striking proof of the rapid subsidence was
not observed till the day before our return. The
shoulder of an outlier of the range pushed its way as a
lofty promontory right into the gulf, its whole length
and breadth being covered with glacial concretion.
Some recent tempest had broken off the end of its river
of ice, and at the same time a sudden subsidence of the
land had left the face of its cliff a complete new section,
as if shorn by a microtome. The sight that revealed
itself to us as we flew round it was most impressive.
City after city had evidently been built upon the broad
bluff, its pleasant position overlooking the inland sea
and its proximity to easy harbourage ever attracting
the population back again after each cataclysm. Time
after time the city had, we conjectured, been over-
whelmed by the ashes of some great volcanic outburst
from the range. There we could see in section the
various strata of buildings one above the other, each
filled with ash and dust and preserved by the power of
frost. Hundreds of years must have elapsed between
the destruction of one city and the building of the next,
a period long enough in fact to obliterate the memory
of panic and anguish from the traditions of posterity.
In some houses we could still discern the signs of the
stampede that had occurred one day thousands of
years ago. Articles of value were half-torn from their
treasuries and then abandoned; jewellery and dishes
made of the precious metals were here and there held

A Warning 651

in place upon the mosaicked floors by the frozen mass
of earth above them; they had evidently been seized at
the first warning of the coming catastrophe and then
thrown away as alarm made life dearer. In one cham-
ber we saw the outline of the body of a man across its
threshold, his hand out beyond his head clutching some
receptacle of precious metals. In the space between
the outer walls of two houses the body of a woman was
exposed, face downwards, and beneath the bosom the
form of an infant child.

How many long-forgotten tragedies might be un-
earthed we could not stay to discover. A little labour
and we could have penetrated into these cities; the
application of a leomoran would have melted the dust
and ashes and brought to view the stratified life of
ages before. Had we been interested in following out
the existence of these far-distant relatives of the L,ima-
norans, we could have begun with the lowest layer,
and followed the evidences of civilisation up through
each successive entombment, till finally the people
were driven from the site by frost, a force more rigor-
ous and potent against culture and luxury than fire.
But the Limanorans had enough in the records of their
own ancestry to tell them all the history that might be
illuminated by such excavations. They knew that
after an advance in the two or three lower strata,
there would be found no progress except in luxury
and the arts that contribute to luxury. And they
had enough of such development in their own archi-
pelago before their own senses, to allay any eager-
ness for viewing illustrations of it in ancient and dead
history.

The sight was interesting and impressive, but we
all had learned its lesson too well to desire further

652 Limanora

acquantance with it. In Fialume we had studied sim-
ilar histories during our pupillage; and daily could we
watch through the idrovamolan the enactment of simi-
lar life in the islands around Limanora. A little ap-
parent advance was followed by as much retrogression;
the generations were as like in essence as two species
of the same genus, the difference being merely super-
ficial and unvital. It was enough to make the lyima-
noran heart stop in its beating to see the dreary
sameness of the ages in the history of a people, as far
as development of spiritual character and power were
concerned. The changes and revolutions were but
changes of lay-figures under the official dresses and
ceremonials, or at best an expansion of the sphere of
luxury. What mattered it to men that were panting
after ideals they ever saw above and beyond them who
were masters and who were servants or subjects in
those unprogressive levels of humanity, who or how
many sated their appetites or covered their skins with
the rich and ceremonious raiment of dominance ? The
heroisms and romances, the striking turns of fortune,
the world-renowned victories that made the eyes of
other races blaze with wonder were all histrionic to
those who knew what real development was.

This section cut through the history of ten thousand
years would reveal but the same old story that they
had read so often in the annals of their own far past.
We turned away sick of heart, knowing the countless
griefs and agonies, struggles and combats, that had
gone to the making of this human stratification, and
the complete futility of them all. The best that could
be thought was that oblivion had buried them, and that
the energy set free at the deaths of so many thousands
of generations had perchance a better opportunity of

A Warning 653

rising in the scale of vitality as it wandered into other
spheres than the human or the terrestrial.

It was not then without deliberate intention that our
departure from the old home of the race occurred soon
after the discovery of this strange frozen museum of
forgotten peoples. After everything was done that
could be done to divert the upward pressure of the
subterranean fires from vents close to the margin of the
sea, the faleenas winged their way back to the north as
rapidly as they had come. No incident took place to
mar the return voyage, and we were soon back at our
old employments in L,imanora.

CHAPTER XIII

RELIGION

AFTER a few days' reflection and observation, I
felt a change in the spirit of the people. There
was less of that serenity which had struck me so often
as one of the distinctive characteristics of themselves
and their actions. Every family seemed to hurry in
its efforts at development and the pace of their advance
might almost be called feverish now. This was espe-
cially the case with all who were engaged in the more
spiritual investigations into the nature of the cosmos.
Next to them in increase of eagerness and enthusiasm
came the astronomical families, the astro-biological,
and all whose researches bore upon stellar conditions
and interstellar migration. The gaze of the whole race
was more distinctly outwards and extra-terrestrial.

I had conjectured the cause of this acceleration and
impetuosity and soon definitely knew it to be the re-
sult of our expedition to the south and the reports we
brought back. The elders on considering them saw
that the safety of the island as a resting-place and arena
for their progress was not to be depended on for many
generations more. The increase in the rate of subsid-
ence of their old home meant a transference of the de-
structive power of the subterranean fires to the other

654

Religion 655

end of the ancient fissure within a measurable period.
The volcanic vents on the antarctic coast must be
closed beneath the ocean before many centuries were
over; and the rushing waters in quenching their fires
would find their way in uncontrollable steam towards
the weakest point of the crust, which they knew to be
their own archipelago. Hre many generations could
come and go this terrestrial home of the race would be
blown to dust, and new lands would appear at some
other point on the line of fissure.

Where could they settle on the round of the earth?
There was no land except their old home to the south
isolated enough to admit of their following up their
ideals. All the remote islands in other oceans were
already fully occupied, and were impracticable for them
unless at the sacrifice of human life, a condition that
would outrage their whole idea of development. The
globe was closed for them except the region of everlast-
ing ice where their remote ancestry had dwelt; and that
too might at any moment flash into dust before the ex-
plosive forces beneath the crust. The alternative of
seeking a home on another star had seemed to them the
only one for many generations, and they had been pre-
paring for it by inventions that would enable them to
float clear of the terrestrial atmosphere for many cent-
uries, and by explorations in interstellar space. But
many discoveries and thoughts had thrown a new light
upon this stellar migration. The}7 would have to ex-
ist in their circumscribed faleenas as they travelled
through the ether for many generations of even their
long lives, and these ships would be their cradle and
their tomb. They would have to resign for many cent-
uries the conquests of the elements and of the forces
of nature, that they had achieved in Limauora. The

656 Limanora

broad movement which these past ages of history had
given to their life, would be narrowed into a space no
larger than one chamber of their own mansions. They
would live imprisoned, and their imprisonment would
lay its brand upon their natures and still more upon
the natures of their descendants. The proximity of so
many in so small a space would breed physical and,
still worse, spiritual disease, that would haunt their
posterity for generations after they should settle in
their new stellar abode. Their offspring would have
the habits and ideas of the savage reared in the wigwam
of the rover or the hut of the slave. Even if they could
achieve individual flight through the ether, they would
have to keep close to their storeships and return every
few minutes to the exhausted atmosphere of their swift-
winging faleenas.

If every condition of their interstellar voyage were
the same as their life in their own L,imanora, what
disappointments might not they encounter in their
comparative ignorance of the biology of the heavens?
Would not most stars that were fit to be inhabited be
already choked with life and life at a different stage
from that they had attained ? If they struck upon a
lower grade of existence it would be useless to attempt
to raise it, and contrary to their own morality to oblit-
erate it. If they met with a higher type of being, they
would be repulsed by it as likely to degrade it. It
would be a wretched existence to lead a life of inter-
stellar vagabondage, poor beggars of the cosmos, seek-
ing a star whereon they might rest the sole of their
foot. Not more than one world in each system could
be at the stage that would fit their life-evolution; most
stars would be too young and fierily crude or too old
and exhausted to give them the conditions they sought

Religion 657

for. In many the life they would encounter would
shock and repel them by its monstrosity. What was to
hinder some such gigantic form as, the Leorno knew,
had existed on the earth in its earlier geological ages,
some tremendous winged saurian, having the place on
one or more of the stars they visited that man held
upon earth ? It only meant the development of a brain
proportionate to the hugeness of the bulk, and some
swiftly moving, deft, and adaptable limb, like the hu-
man hand, to give it complete dominance over all the
forms of life around it. The elephant needed only the
mechanical faculty of the beaver or of the ant to out-
strip man in the struggle of life; he had the delicate
manipulator in his trunk, he had the long life, and he
had the capacity of skull to transform him into the
dominant race of the earth. In order to the mastery of
his conditions, he had only to make the step from using
anything that came ready to his trunk as a weapon into
shaping it to his will. Circumstances, accidents, op-
portunities, pilot the evolution of life upon a world, and
the accidental condition of an element or an energy or
a locality might have transformed some terrific monster
into the master of the first .star they visited. It was
merely a matter of more or less intricate convolutions
of the brain. But perhaps the most terrible thing of
all would be to land on a world whose inhabitants had
developed the purely intellectual faculties and the sec-
tion cf the brain corresponding to them, at the expense
of the nervous centres that have to do with the control
of the passions and with the subordination of the ani-
mal nature; what a horror it would be to find a star
full of Calibans with more than human cunning, and
none of human emotion or morality!

The thought of chances like these gave them pause

658 Limanora

in their migratorial quest. They began to feel that
even life amongst the ruder of their fellow-men might
be better than landing amongst monsters unstirred by
pity or compassion, reverence or tenderness for highly
developed life, to whom bloodshed was nothing. It
was true that there were in most nations men who were
so constituted. But they were, except when they got
the command of huge armies and became conquerors,
bridled by fear of the punishments that the laws of the
country meted out to criminals. It was better to live
in proximity to beings amongst whom this moral and
emotional neutrality is an exception, than in a world
filled with such monsters. Perchance, when their
island-home was shattered to dust, their true path lay
along the surface of their own globe. They might
settle on the slope of some sky-piercing mountain,
round whose feet lay untainted tribes of primitive sav-
ages; there they might preserve their isolation as per-
fectly as in Limanora by a hedge of fear around them,
which their exceptional power over the forces of nature
should forge.

But they knew that before many ages could pass
civilised man would penetrate amongst the awed tribes
with his potent weapons and his unscrupulous cunning;
then would they be unable to avoid bloodshed, or hypo-
critical ambush, or diplomacy; ambition and hatred
would enter in and turn their paradise into a hell. On
the whole, they inclined to the other alternative that
lay before them when the great catastrophe came; that
is, to let it do its worst on their physical or lower ele-
ments. Out of their shattered bodies would rise the
energy of their systems to follow its career of develop-
ment untrammelled by any slow-moving matter that
was half inert whether living or dead. Death so sud-

Religion 659

den as that, death under any cirumstances or condi-
tions, was no stop or misfortune to the highest that
was in them; it was the swiftest way to achieve migra-
tion into the interstellar spaces. As it was, they were
narrowed and localised in their development, thought
(the higher thought) alone finding its way unchecked
to any point or sphere in the cosmos. At death they
would all be freed from the almost vegetative functions
of human existence; they would be released from the
prison of locality and their whole being would have the
ease of thought in winging from infinity to infinity,
and in disregarding the limitations of time and space.
Together the whole of their race might find coalescence
if not companionship in following out their career of
development, unburdened by alliance with a lower type
of energy, and in more swiftly attaining a higher and
higher goal in the scale of energies.

When this conclusion had been reached by the con-
sciousness of the people, the old serenity returned to
them. They were ready to meet whatever came, not
caring whether their ascent through the grades of being
was trammel led by terrestrial forms of energy or set free
in the infinities of ether. But I dimly felt that there
was a sublime looking upwards in all they did or said
added to their former serenity that transformed it into
what approached to the noblest forms of devotional
ecstasy I had seen amongst men. They never allowed
themselves to fall into the moulds of thought that his
bodily and terrestrial needs so freely supply to man.
Though recognising the practical demands of the
.physical nature, they satisfied and then dismissed them
as rapidly as was possible; and with all their marvel-
lous machinery and inyentjons and their accumulation

660 Limanora

of power, the time occupied in this satisfaction was so
abbreviated as to be scarcely noticeable in the labyrinth
of daily pursuits.

I had been greatly puzzled during my long period of
training to see no trace of religious worship in this
noble race. Growing up with the instinct in me that
of all manifestations of human possibilities religion was
the most sublime, yet I had come to know before I left
Europe how degraded, gross, and foul even a lofty-
minded religion might become. But the best men and
women I had known there had ever been stirred with
the spirit of religious reverence and love. I could not
account for these, the noblest and ablest beings I had
seen on earth, ignoring the claims of what is the
highest of all, and I watched eagerly for any indication
of acts or moods of worship. Early in my residence on
the island I had discovered that there were no temples
and no priests; that was patent to the most casual
glance of the stranger. Amongst all their public build-
ings there was none that could be taken as devoted to
the worship of a deity, and there was no family or caste
or set of men whose chief functions were to superin-
tend such a worship. But perhaps their religious acts
were private or even secret and I was on the alert
many years for any sign of such a thing in the house
of my proparents or in that of Thyriel. Finally dis-
covering nothing that could be construed even in the
most distant way into a ceremonial attitude or word, I
gradually abandoned any expectation of such a thing.

My attention was now aroused by the new halo
around their serene acceptance of the conditions of life.
There was rapture and there was longing in their hal- .
cyon view of the world; yet the rapture and the long-
ing never withdrew them from immediate pursuits and

Religion 66 1

duties, never gave them the ennui of life that transport
and passion generally entrain. They seemed to have
the vision and the upward glance of the seer without
his brooding and apartness. It was rather an intensi-
fication of their usual feelings and attitude to life.
This was nearer than anything else I had experienced
in lyimanora to the unperturbed faith in a higher being
and the yearning for proximity to him that I had wit-
nessed in those whom we used in Europe to call, for lack
of a less trite term, saints. At the next Manora or de-
cennial review the predominating interest was the the-
opathic side of human nature, and I discovered more
of their views of religion in the few years preceding it
than in all the decades I had spent amongst them.

So devotional did I think the magnetism which ran
through the community, that I plucked up courage to
ask about the religion. My question was dealt with in
the calmest and most rational way possible amongst
human beings. There was no immediate reply, except
an elevation of the finger to the brow and then to
the wide vault of the sky, but I was led to a part of
Fialume I had not visited. It lay in a region of the
valley that I had carefully avoided as full of gloom, and
damp with the vapour of a tumbling waterfall; I had
never noticed any one enter it, and my curiosity had
never been awakened about it.

Here were stored the records that illustrated the evo-
lution of religion, records made by light, sound, and
magnetism. It was intensely interesting for me to
see so complete a museum of the natural history of
worship. Every faith in the world had its due place,
fixed according to its inner spirit and development.
So graphic was the map of the whole that in a moment I
saw the common kinship of all, and the differentiating

662 Limanora

qualities that made one worship higher and more ad-
vanced than another. My guide flashed living pictures
of the ceremonies of each, and then let me listen to the
speeches and talks of the officiants and of many of
the worshippers. The magnetographs struck into me
the feelings that pervaded the masses in the temples,
and those that filled the breast of the solitary priest or
devotee during the most solemn and enthusiastic act of
worship. I could feel how much or how little the re-
ligion introduced into the life of the people. Day after
day I returned with eagerness to the sight and the
study of this absorbing phase of human nature, and
seemed to get to the very heart of every faith and its
influence. The mere accidents of its history were felt
to be non-essential ; its inner development stood out as
plainly as if written in letters of fire.

My guide did not need to teach me the lesson. I
knew it as well as if I had learned it from infancy. I
knew why there were no temples, no ceremonies, no
hierophantic families, no outward sign of faith,
amongst this far-seeing people. .'Their own early er

/ideavours to purify and develop the faith handed down
to them from their forefathers were there as vividly
pictured as any faith from the world outsidej They

^ Bad had temples as splendid as any I have ever seen or
heard described; their ceremonies were artistic, noble,
and significant; their music was as nearly sublime as
earthly music can be; and the priestly profession at-
tracted many of the ablest and some of the best natures
in the community by its princely salaries, drawn from
the gifts of former ages of the faithful, and by its high
prerogatives.

At first I wondered how it had been possible to up-
root an institution that had evidently grown out of the

Religion 663

most intimate instincts of the race. The higher digni-
taries were so lordly and influential they might easily
control even by their private alliances and social dom-
inance the powers of the state; and the poorer hiero-
phants had ingratiated themselves with the middle
classes and proletariate, from whom they came. Rev-
erence, fear, love, ambition, pride, self-interest, all the
commoner emotions and passions of humanity, were
engaged and intertwined with the worship. How
could such a widely ramifying profession allow Jtsel
be overthrown ? fy s&* && £3^""

When the exilings were over, it was found that\
there was not a member of the priestly profession left
on the island; nor was there anything of the wealth
the church, except the solid walls of the tem
dignitaries and most of the transferable riches had
found their way to Aleofane; the bulk of the poor
clergy landed in Tirralaria, and smaller bands drifted
away to smaller islands like Coxuria, establishing there
communities marked by some extreme eccentricity of
faith. All the vestments and altars and ornaments of
the temples had vanished before the last expedition left
the shores of lyimanora; even the huge bells that had
rung to service, and the baser metals for making the
roofs water-tight, had disappeared. Nothing but the
stones and mortar were left to indicate where the great
faith of the past had housed itself. One or two expe-
ditions even were seen to set out from Tirralaria and
Aleofane to fetch the very temples away stone by stone.
To prevent the cupidity of the exiles from wasting itself
on futile attempts against the island, the edifices were
tumbled into the sea, and helped to make the bastions
which guarded the shores.

Having thus got rid of all the outward property and

664 Limanora

signs of their former worship, they had to count the
cost and consider how they were to meet the situation.
It had been inculcated by the officiants of the church
for untold generations that all morality, and in fact all
civilisation, would vanish with faith. Religion was
the foundation of everything in life that was worth
preserving, and most of the people trembled if any
change were proposed in the national worship. They
feared that the object of their devotion would withdraw
the light of his countenance from them, should the
slightest feature of it be modified. Even the scientific
and cultured thought that religion acted as an excellent
watchdog or policeman, keeping the uneducated within
the bounds of the laws and traditions of the nation.
Changes had crept in unobserved by the worshippers,
and had been sanctified by time; then open proposals
for change gave the shock and the alarm, and made the
whole fabric seem to shake and totter. The unper-
ceived changes were far greater and more revolutionary
in their ultimate effect, for they were generally changes
of degeneration which ended in decay and ruin. But
everything that was deliberately intended to fit the old
institution to the new times was looked on with horror,
as sacrilege never to be forgiven.

It was therefore with a certain tremor that they de-
molished the ancient temples, and put their stones to
new and seemingly secular uses. But once the trans-
formation was accomplished and no great catastrophe
followed, even the less bold gathered courage. As
time went on and the old faith was forgotten and no
definite new creed took its place, it began to be felt that
the terror of religious change and the belief that re-
ligion alone gave the guaranty of all morality and
civilisation were alike baseless. After a decade or two,

Religion 665

when they began to reflect on their past and analyse
their new states of mind and public feeling, they dis-
covered the most striking effect of this abeyance of ec-
clesiasticism to be the attainment of the ideal of all
true religion. Into their very life had soaked, the
inner spirit of devotion. Every act was done with a
reference to something far higher than itself, to which
the doer looked up with reverence yet with the sense of
its possible attainment in the future. Every piece of
conduct, every item of character was moulded as if for
all time. All their work they laboured at with an
earnestness, enthusiasm, and care that evinced the
consciousness of its everlasting issues. In short, they
found that the surest way to exclude religion from the
life was to assign to it a special section of time, a
special profession, and special edifices. These acted as
a conduit that drew it from the true business of ex-
istence. Men and women came to feel that, these once
being set apart, all was done that could be done for the
object of their worship, and that the rest of their life
upon earth could be given up to whatsover pleased them,
be it irreligious, wicked, or even vile. The religious
section of their lives threw its consecrating and protect-
ing shadow over the worst they might do or say or
think. Thus came about the strange paradox that the
vilest of criminals were often the most devoted to re-
ligion when they went into the temples. The speciali-
sation of what should belong to the whole life and
conduct lessens its value. If there is a particular
channel for religion it will be confined to that chan-
nel, except in rare seasons of enthusiasm, when it floods
the adjacent regions and does universal havoc.

Formerly the most religious had been the least trust-
worthy in the ordinary business of life, and they had

666 Limanora

not been able to understand why; for the deity they
worshipped was a compound of all the noblest virtues
they could conceive, and honesty and truth and con-
stancy were three of these. Now they perceived that,
having given a tithe of their civilisation and energy to
the object of their worship, they had shut him and the
virtues he embodied out from the rest; he had no claim
on that. It was vain for the creed or the priests to in-
sist that the faith should be carried into the life, as
long as there was a special part of life dedicated to it
Once the pales were down, and there was no distinction
between time and time, between place and place, and
between act and act, the nesting-place of hypocrisy dis-
appeared. Kvery day was sacred; every place was a
sanctuary; every act was holy; every moment of their
life, every action was a prayer. For they were ever
looking upwards and forwards towards the ideal and
believed that the noblest reverence they coufd pay to the
cosmos and to the presiding spirit of the cosmos was to
raise their own natures ever higher in the cosmic scale.
Everything that withdrew them from this cultivation
of the special plot assigned to them in the universe,
from the development of their better selves, was delay-
ing the true purpose of existence; even acts of rever-
ence and ceremonies of faith were but waste of cosmic
energy. As long as they kept raising their struggle
for existence to a higher plane, so long were they truly
reverencing the greatest being of all, the spirit that
gave and was the palpitating life of the cosmos.

They acknowledged that every religion in its origin
was a recognition of unknown elements or beings far
above the plane of the worshippers. But it rapidly
degenerated into mere parasitism upon its deity. The
more spiritual faiths in their earlier stages express

Religion 667

the yearning for higher scales of being in true efforts
to bring the life of the worshipper nearer to that of
the worshipped. But soon the curse of religion comes
upon them ; they try to include races on a lower plane
than that of their first worshippers and moulders and
to these they must adapt themselves; for it is the mass,
the numbers that form the ultimate mould of a faith;
the noble natures, for whom they originally came into
being, are left neglected and undeveloped, and the
whole worship goes lower and lower to fit the needs of
the increasing numbers of converts.

Insignificant though the L,imanorans felt themselves
to be against the infinity of the cosmos, they refused
to formulate their worship lest it should fall into par-
asitism, the source of most of the evil and retrogression
in the universe. They knew that it was possible for
the lower being to try to rise to the level of existence
of the higher and worshipped, and, in advancing, to
help his advance. But they had seen too much in his-
tory and in contemporary life of the symbiosis of wor-
shippers becoming mere parasitism to trust themselves
to anything definite and outward in religion. In daily
intercourse the lower and weaker natures cling to the
higher and stronger; and if they fail to reciprocate the
benefit they receive, and cease to attempt to elevate
themselves to the level of their hosts, then they suck
the life-blood from them and degrade them. The same
holds in religion. The mean worshippers (and the
majority in mixed communities are mean) make no
effort to better themselves; the higher ideal that they
are taught to reverence as a god, they batten upon for
favours; they pray to him and yearn for him, not
that they may be like him but that he may be like
them, and become their active and efficient partner in

668 Limanora

material things and their accomplice in their mean or
evil deeds. The Limanorans conceived that all the
higher beings of space struggle to keep clear of such
parasitic religionists as the majority of men are. There
is no road up the steep of being but by patient self-
development through generations and generations.
Almost all religions, after their early and enthusiastic
stage, are royal roads that seem to lead to the heights
of heaven, and are but descents to hell. They only de-
lude men into thinking that there are other ways to
divine happiness than that likeness to the divine nature
which is to be attained by nothing but slow, gradual,
inward change.

They had seen so much of the degeneration and im-
morality of faiths, not only in their own history but in
the history of the world, that nothing would persuade
them to formulate or define in words what they meant
by religion at any stage of their development. For,
once they had defined, there was a platform of self-
opinion and self-interest to fight for, a nucleus of petri-
faction. Rites and outward worship would follow, and
a priesthood whose interest it would be to teach that
what they profess as a creed is absolute truth. Right
well the Limanorans knew how false such teaching is.
No age can have a view of life that is not moulded
by contemporaneous circumstances and capacity of
thought and feeling, and the farther the people pass in
time and spirit from the primitive age of the founders
of their religion, the more stoutly will they uphold
every word of the creed and every feature of the insti-
tution. Nothing but a sanguinary revolution will
avail to undo the tragic knot with which the spirit of
man has thus bound itself. However good for progress

Religion 669

the enthusiasm of a faith might be in its early stage, it
inevitably became the tomb of the human spirit. Oc-
cult explanations of statements that did not tally with
acknowledged facts or laws were bound to appear, as
soon as the mind of the people began to move and de-
velop; and the Limanorans knew that their marvellous
progress had been largely due to the early resolve to
have nothing to do with the occult or merely mys-
terious. Their pioneering books dealt with what still
lay under the horizon of the future; but they started
from recognised facts and principles and attempted to
supply working hypotheses for the men of science.
There was nothing of magic or superstition in them,
nothing that did not appeal to the laws of reason
and ascertained scientific data, nothing that was not
meant to be tested by the methods of daily practical
life.

Not that they never thought over the problems that
are commonly called religious, or yearned for com-
munion with existences nobler than their own. But
their thoughts and feelings were kept out of the sphere
of definite expression, through fear that their temporary
solutions might crystallise and become permanent.
Their faith was purely individual and inward. Yet,
when some great step was to be taken in the onward
march of the race, as for instance, when a new type of
child or enterprise was preparing to be born, the whole
community yearned silently towards the living spirit of
the cosmos; all their being thrilled with one magnetism
that seemed to quiver upwards through the ether, and
return again to strengthen and console them in their
work. Their ideal seemed to pass as by an inspiration
into the child or the enterprise about to be born. The
universe, they felt, echoed to their thought; but it

670 Limanora

would have been desecration to put their seerlike long-
ing into any form of human expression.

This was the nearest they came to what is called
worship in other nations. It was difficult to get them
to speak of it, for what they would have called their
religion was their whole life, their pressing forward
and upward in development. Their religion was what
Europeans would have defined as the discovery of God,
rather than the worship of any idea of Him. It was
based on the knowledge that the world had advanced
from insignificant life to comparatively noble self-con-
scious life, and it held firmly that no finality could
have yet been reached, that there was nobler life be-
yond still to achieve. Ever, as they climbed upwards
in development, they had descried new ideals on the far
horizon that threw into shadow what they had been
aiming at. On and on would they still climb, nearer
and nearer to the ultimate ideal of the cosmos, which
is God.

Not to progress was to be irreligious; even to look
back and make an idol out of a superseded ideal, a hero
out of a past saviour, was to sin. There had been reve-
lations of the ultimate spirit of the cosmos, but they
were ever superseded by the advance of the race; for
every advance to a new type was a revelation; all true
and developing life was a revelation. No revelation
could be other than for a time; it was sure to lose its
illuminating power as the years or the generations pro-
gressed. Many sacred books they had had, books that
were no longer sacred, only retaining the reverence for
that which had once aided in their development. As
long as it continued to hold a beacon ahead of the race,
a book remained sacred, but once its ideal had been
overtaken by the national progress, light died out of it.

Religion 671

For a dead book that retained its sacredness became
a fetich and obstructed development. Not only did
they reverence their sacred books; every noble utter-
ance, every noble act, that held out an ideal for men to
strive after was as sacred ; but as soon as the sentiment
or thought or morality was seen to be merely of the
past, it was set aside. Nothing could possibly be final
in a universe that was ever developing, with faculties
and powers of observation that were ever getting more
capable of comprehending new phases and energies of
the cosmos. To accept a book or a faith or an ideal as
finally sacred was to offend against the ultimate, the
free spirit of the cosmos which was ever leading on-
wards to new heights and new outlooks into the future.
There was no outer worship except life and all its
works. All other worship was waste of time and effort
which might have been used to raise the worshippers
in the scale of being. Every attempt to conciliate God
or imagine Him or model Him was blasphemy against
the effort to rise towards Him. But every man had
his own religious thoughts in silence, and there was
welding the whole race to a common purpose, a mag-
netic sympathy which was deeply religious; it was the
sympathy with every thought that tended to advance.
But all vain contemplation or self-reflection not leading
to a progressive purpose was waste of life and therefore
evil. For evil, they held, is the rebellion of the past
against the future; and though a new religion is an
effort of nature to make alliance with the future, it
soon, by reason of having reached or seeming to have
reached its ideal, crystallises and becomes the ally of
the past. The spirit of stagnancy and retrogression,
what we in Christendom would call the devil, laughs at
new religions and counts old religions as its best allies;

672 Limanora

so ran a common maxim of theirs. They would have
nothing to do with what would withdraw any current
of their life energy from the great work of advance.

If there was any division of their race that could be
said to approach to a priesthood, it was the men and
women of science, especially the pioneers, or the imagi-
native amongst them; for they had their eyes bent un-
flinchingly on the future. Theirs it was to see that the
race was ever advancing. They never suffered the pres-
ent to interfere with the development that was to be.
They stirred their fellow-Umanorans to the enthusiasm
of anticipation, and watched with unfaltering jealousy
every glance turned upon the past. The moments
spent upon history and antiquarian research they
counted lost, unless their aim was to throw illumina-
tion upon the future. Mere students of the past were
backsliders, whom they had to chide for their offences
against the evolution of the cosmos. They held up to
the eyes of their countrymen the nobleness and beauty
of the ideals that were to be soon attained, or, if need
were, the sublimity of those that lay just under the
horizon in the dimness of twilight.

They would have nothing to do with mere mystery,
the basis of all superstition. They never lost sight of
the margin of the half-known that was ever receding
before the advance of investigation into the dark in-
finitude, but they would have no dealings with it be-
yond the gaze of scientific imagination as it planted
itself upon the heights of already achieved knowledge.
Such dealings led to gross superstition and charlatanry,
to pretence of more intercourse with the unknown than
was warranted by the knowledge of the time; there
was no standard by which they could be measured or
checked, and, if once they were allowed, they would

Religion 673

give unlimited scope for self-deceit and imposture.
Faith was a matter for silent meditation and for dream;
speech or act would only bring it down to the dull level
of memory. The faith they spoke of was faith in the
great future of man, and the pioneers were encouraged
to sketch out and foreshadow its possibilities by way
of dream; but that dream was ever the best which
traced the whole faith through practice to complete
achievement.

One of the great imaginative books of the time
mapped out the route of self abnegation ; it described
the denial of the lower or material self, and the reduc-
tion of it to insignificance in the human system. It
showed how by such means and by meditation a man
of lofty thought might comprehend the whole range
of the universe, and, passing from spiritual height to
spiritual height, at last be capable of gathering infin-
itude within the scope of his soul. Thus could he ap-
proach to communion with the heart and soul of the
cosmos, with the sun of all things. Not in one genera-,
tion would this be accomplished. But, by the selection
of parents who had wrought such a habit of thought
and life into their constitutions, they might have in a
century of generations beings who were all spirit un-
hampered by physical modes of thought and feeling.

Not even this ideal man of the future would they
worship. For he would still be man, infinities short of
the highest he could be in the cosmos; and nothing
short of absolute perfection should be the object of so
intense a concentration and prostration of the soul as
worship. To accept any mere embodiment of humanity
as the centre of adoration was antagonistic to their
great ethical maxim that the ultimate object of every
action or desire should be higher than the highest

43

674 Limanora

existing human life. To worship even the idea of hu-
manity, were it possible for a spirit with its feelings
and imagination limited to human moulds, would lower
the aspirations of thought; apart from the difficulties
of its abstractness, it would be open to the objection of
obstructing progress by setting up a deity who was but
an amalgam of all the failings, as well as all the virtues,
of mankind. The Limanorans smiled at the ineptitude
of making so imperfect creatures as ourselves the chief
elements of godhead, when there were such infinitudes
around us and above us, and such eternities before us.
Even if it should be possible to eliminate from the hu-
man idea of deity all but progress and the noblest
virtue, it would be obviously absurd to worship an
ideal that was soon, with the earth it dwelt on, to
vanish in the dust, vapour, and heat of cosmic collision.
All open worship was inevitably hampered, they held,
by the limitations of human nature; and anthropo-
morphic it must be, despite^all efforts to bar out the
human from it, and as anthropomorphic, certain to
be antiquated by any real progress on the part of the
worshippers.

These elements in religions make them the enemies
of all advance except perhaps advance in luxury.
Their guardians feel that they are sure to be super-
seded if the spirit of man should rise above the condi-
tions in which the worships were moulded. It is one
of the strongest yearnings of life to remain as it is; only
there are forces material and spiritual ever goading it
on the path of advance, threatening inferiority or defeat
or death, unless it goes on. But so infinitesimal is the
progress thus made under the sting of natural law that
it is scarcely noticeable in periods short of hundreds of
generations; few or no nations or races have retained

Religion 675

historic dominance or even historic consciousness of
their past so long.

This unconscious meliorism was considered by the
Limanorans as little better than the development of
animals, when left to themselves. Only deliberate
effort on the part of a state and its members can pro-
duce advance that is to be felt, or that acts as a stimulus
to farther advance. It is seldom that unconscious pro-
gress is other than material, whilst it inevitably entails
reaction into stagnancy or retrogression. Nay, the
whole human race at times takes a run forward, arid
then stumbles and falls, only to slide back into its old
footprints. Some new impulse, sweeping through the
ether, has stirred men in each race, whose enthusiasm,
or, as it is commonly called, inspiration, awakens the
spirit of progress in the era.

Conservatism is the native or fundamental attitude
of every being, the tendency to make the rest of the
adjacent world give way that it may perpetuate its ex-
istence or that of its brood. Selfishness is thus the
very texture of life, and it is difficult to see how it can
engender its opposite, self-sacrifice. - The sexual and
the parental instincts are the crude material of the lat-
ter. But the fire of thought and enthusiastic impulse
is needed to refine this material into a love that
stretches beyond the immediate object of these instincts
and takes in the interests of the race and last of all those
of mankind; something higher and more alien to the
instincts of man is demanded for the comprehension of
his nobler development. In the valley of memories
was shown me at one stage of my education a complete
elucidation of the prehistoric phases of evolution; first
came the struggle for life amongst the innumerable
claimants for the mastery of the new earth, those

676 Limanora

elementary forms that, coming out of space, will settle
on any world new or old that they may encounter, the
advanced organisations seeking only orbs well-fitted for
their progress. Across the geological ages I could see
this competition raising the minute cells of the primeval
creatures into elaborately organised beings. I saw sex
save the new existence from the dominion of mere brute
appetite. But from outside the world came the trans-
formation which made it the saviour of man, the ul-
timately dominant animal upon the .sphere. This
transformed instinct expanded by slow steps love of
children into love of race, then into philanthropy, at
first bland and crude and often unreal in the presence
of the old sensual and family love, but finally strong
and noble and able to embrace the progress of man as a
spirit. The last stage overleapt the prehistoric, and
came to be limited, except in rare and isolated instances,
to Limanora. Enlightened philanthropy, I could see,
held the attempt to reform all mankind as vain as to
convert the lower animals into the human form and
nature. Once more I went back into Fialume and
studied the panorama of evolution, and I recognised
the full meaning of it; the great impulses upwards and
forwards had come from outside the world, and chiefest
of all the longing to evolve a human nature to which
death would be but an insignificant step from life to
life, and which would recognise in itself more and more
affinity to the highest life of infinite space.

But this section of Fialume only gave a bird's-eye
view of the elevation of life upon the earth. None
were allowed to linger after they had drawn from it the
lesson and the force it could give them for marching
forward. Minuter study of the past might lead their
youth to think ignobly of life and to accept " Might is

Religion 677

right" as its fundamental maxim. Nature, as seen
amongst the ravening beasts or amongst the naked
cruelty and injustice of primitive men, might be taken
by them as dominant through all human evolution. If
any history was to be studied minutely, it was only the
more recent history of their own race, where the old
laws of nature that were opposed to justice and char-
ity and self-sacrifice have been sublimated and trans-
cended, where new senses have opened gateways for a
new knowledge which would once have been called su-
persensible. What could this people learn from the
study of lapsed civilisations, that had risen out of
childish savagery only to fall back again ? The sole
aim of these was happiness, and this ever degenerated
into the pursuit of pleasure, ending sooner or later in
brutal selfishness. It had been one of the earlier in-
stincts from their post-purgation life, that they have
least happiness who think most of it. Happiness, or
even pleasure, might be made at times the test of suc-
cessful actions and pursuits; but it never should be
made an aim in itself. Higher civilisations were less
happy than savagery or barbarism; their advances in
commerce and even in science only added more con-
sciousness of misery to the many, and more eagerness
for new luxury to the few. Most civilisations, as they
advance, merely add to the desires and thus more
effectually enslave human nature to locality and time.
The newer types produce no greater intellects, no
greater imaginations, than those that have lived and
fallen, whilst their masses have greatly receded in
happiness and in simplicity of virtue. The changes of
what is commonly called progress only bring new evils
that have to be cured, and the energetic minority who
have produced the changes and suppose themselves to

678 Limanora

benefit by them at first refuse to see the evils, and after
a time are driven to attempt their cure by drastic
remedies which bring universal ruin all the quicker.

The Ivimanoran horizon was too rapidly widening to
allow of more than the most cursory survey of the de-
generate past or of the contemporary present, even had
it been to their interests to study them more minutely.
Their own future was expanding in so many directions
as to demand all their energies. World after world,
star after star, universe after universe, were revealing
their character and stage of development to L,imanoran
science. New marvels every year impressed upon them
the wisdom of avoiding all denial and scepticism with
regard to what imagination or faith should suggest, of
holding neutrality towards all that was unprovable or
even contrary to their knowledge of the laws of nature.
They ventured only in the safe track of facts, whence
they shot their flashes of conjecture into the dark. But
from past experience they learned to distrust denial or
even scepticism in regions where knowledge could not
venture yet. Imagination had been found a trusty
pioneer, and one of their recent books held out the
hope that before long the suggestions of faith might be
but the messages which flew through the ether over
what might be called a cosmic telegraph, and that,
where these touched the souls of the noblest, they came
from the central spirit of the cosmos.

Already they were far on the way along several lines
towards such a consummation, and modifications of
their ooloran or sonarchitect had been employed in
many channels of cosmic investigation. They had
long ago conjectured that the earth's atmosphere, act-
ing as a gigantic ooloran, gathered the sound-waves
that travelled through space and used them to shape

Religion 679

the things of the earth, as they came into being; and
recent discoveries had almost turned the conjecture
into fact. Sometimes the vibrations came from an in-
choate or a degenerate world ; and then, as in the earlier
or saurian stage of animal life and development, the
terrene creatures took monstrous shape under the re-
sonator of the atmosphere.- Sometimes they came from
orbs that knew only beauty and grace of form; and
then, as when the plants and trees and flowers and
shells of the earth were branching into new species, few
terrestrial things but fell into graceful moulds. And
now, having struck this far-reaching and fundamental
thought, they turned it to noble use. They produced
a huge modification of the ooloran which would fix
upon the shape of a flower or fern or shell, and trans-
late it into the music that had originally moulded it.
Nothing earthly but would yield to them through this
reversed sonarchitect the sonant or other vibrations
that had at first shaped it. Step by step this new art
which interpreted the moulding influences of the uni-
verse advanced into an organised and scientific division
of the duties of the race. Step by step it mastered the
harmony of form, and gave the people the music that
rang through interstellar space at the shaping of the
beautiful things of the world.

A great book of the time showed how far the art
could go in leading their religion from the silent to the
sonant form. There were vibrations throughout the
cosmos that came from no one of the worlds or their
inhabitants. They emanated from the centre of all
existence, whence they had mysteriously moulded the
spirits of great reformers and sages; they were the
voice of God ringing down through the aisles of crea-
tion. It was now not only possible, but within the

680 Limanora

limits of the practicable, to find by the aid of one of
their new sonarchitects the cosmic harmonies that had
moulded the souls of the great enthusiasts and sages of
the world. They might translate the voice of God into
the vibrations that would appeal, if not to their ear, to
their higher and more recent senses. The seemingly
fantastic groupings of stars would send into their minds
the divine secret guiding their movements. Nearer
and nearer would they creep under the great dome
of heaven to the centre of energy, whose voice these
vibrations were. True religion though this might be,
never would they consent to fix it in creed or cere-
monial. On and on must their art of musical sonarchi-
tecture go, keeping pace with their ever-advancing
science, but never reaching finality in interpreting the
voice of God.

Nothing in fact could be nearer to what other men
call religion than Limanoran science; it was never
weary of listening to the voice of God in the cosmos
and ever looked upwards and onwards to a wider and
loftier creation. It refused to look back, unless the
retrospect was to assist its march forward. Every dis-
covery was the truest act of devotion, a step nearer to
the centre of" being; and anything that would obstruct
such discoveries or the advance they stimulated was
retrogressive, a sin against the being who was drawing
all things into the path of development. Fixity of be-
liefs was the surest obstruction to progress, and, along
with all superstition, the grossest immorality.

There was no evil inherent in matter or any of the
lower forms of life. Kvil lay in returning to one of
these after knowing and fulfilling something higher.
It is this against which the human spirit girds when

Religion 68 1

its lower elements at death go back into the grave.
For, the Limanorans held, matter is not to be rigidly
divided from spirit as something contrastive and an-
tagonistic. They saw none of the strict divisions in
nature that Western science and philosophy knew, ar-
ranging terrene things into matter and spirit, man and
beast, and cosmic things into God and the world.
Matter was vital and moving, as spirit was, though not
in the same degree. Animals were ever on the same
path of evolution as man was, though most species of
them were far behind most of mankind. The worlds
were the speech of God, methods of manifesting Him-
self and of making His lower manifestations evolve
into higher. There were gradations throughout the
cosmos, and the boundaries between them were difficult
to discern.

Man is the highest grade that man knows definitely;
for human personality is the amalgam of the knowing
and the known. The animal as higher than the vege-
table knows the world as separate from itself, but it does
not know or study itself as a world apart; nor can it be
conscious of the general being or purpose of the uni-
verse. Man is the first animal on earth, so far as we
know, that has gained self- consciousness, and, through
self-consciousness, a glimmering vision of what God
might be. Only by love of retrogression or sin can this
higher element in him return into the ocean of decay
again. The other parts and elements of his system
have to suffer reformation like exhausted worlds, in
order that they may rise higher than they have been.

This was one direction their science took in finding
its way towards the highest of all grades of being. But
it had other lines of as truly religious investigation.
For example, it had found as it proceeded more and

682 Limanora

more subtle mediums of energy in the universe, medi-
ums which had long evaded the rude cognisance of
their primitive senses but which now yielded the secret
of their presence, first to their imaginations, then to
their refined apparatus, and last of all to their more
recently developed senses. The energies that came
through them were impressed upon their senses before
the mediums themselves were; and not till the senses
were touched would the reason be finally persuaded of
their existence. It took long ages to refine their senses
or develop new senses up to the power of detecting new
energies or the mediums through which these travelled.
Imagination led the way; but its lead could not be
trusted unless guided by scientific fact and method.
Its most trustworthy henchman was invention; for this
supplied apparatus that increased the perceptive pow-
ers of the senses a thousandfold. And, as their senses
grew in refinement, the instruments they invented to
aid them increased in subtlety and magnifying power,
so that they were ever able to keep well in advance of
their own unassisted perceptive faculties.

Their sciences too had grown subtler and farther-
reaching in their methods every generation. To their
older chemistry, for instance, the atoms had but a
speculative existence. The newer, with magnetism
and electricity as its main agents and the clirolans as
chief aids, dealt with them directly; and a still more
marvellous analysis was developing which, adding will-
force to magnetism and electricity as reagents, could
find the mediums of nervous energy and classify its
various kinds and modes of action. By means of this
analysis they were able to get at the physical basis of
reflex action, desire, appetite, and the various other
semi-spiritual phenomena of humanity.

Religion 683

A book of the time pointed out a science as far be-
yond this as this had been beyond the older chemistry,
for there were far subtler and higher media of energy
to be discovered and analysed than those of appetite
and desire. Subtlest of all must be that in which the
energy called soul moved. It appeared predominantly
in none but the higher types of the human race, the
men and women of wise creative power. Others had it
as a faint aroma which asserted itself only in moments
of great enthusiasm over the gross powers of appetite
and passion and at other times seemed almost to vanish.
In the Limanorans it had grown to be dominant over
all the faculties and powers of the human system. The
book foresaw that the medium of this noble energy
would be found akin to that of the central energy of
the cosmos, the great being whose phases and manifest-
ations were stars and universes. And the loftier the
mind, the more of this medium did it possess, and the
clearer affinity it had with the creative power of infin-
itude. Not far below this was the medium in which
the energy of morality moved; and the higher the
morality the more sympathetic was its medium with
that of creation. The new science foreshadowed by the
book would display to the advanced race of the future
the movements of these finer media, and the modes of
action by which moral energy and spiritual and creative
energy worked through them.

Then would they see their way to such continuance
of their life as would seem to other men practical im-
mortality. They would be able so to refine and sub-
limate the energies of their systems and the media
through which they acted, as to be free from any of
the transformations called death for almost measureless
periods of time. For the subtler the medium, the more

684 Limanora

self-existent is the energy that moves in it, the less is
it subject to change and the less it needs change in
order to fulfil the purpose of all being. The nearer to
creative power an energy comes, the less it needs alli-
ance with grosser and more perishable media in order
to rise in the scale of existence; decay and death be-
come rarer and rarer incidents. As yet Limanoran
science had not discovered absolute immortality; nor
did it seem likely to discover it. Its experience of the
cosmos pointed to change as the most widely spread of
all principles; whatsoever is allied with any lower
media must shed them, or in other words suffer death,
if it is to continue its march upwards; the whole history
of the earth was a continual record of these transform-
ations. The lyimanorans had taken this aim of terres-
trial existence into their own hands, and by gradually
rejecting the grosser and shorter-lived elements of their
system, they had been able to extend their life, at first
to hundreds, and afterwards to thousands of years.
They now saw before them a limitless vista along which
the necessity of death or transformation would be
hunted farther and farther from birth. And the same
story they saw written all over the cosmos, energy as
it becomes purer and subtler and less dependent for
evolution upon lower forms approaching nearer and
nearer to what would seem immortality from the hu-
man point of view, coming closer and closer to the
creative energy of the cosmos. To them therefore all
their life was religion, and science was its true hiero-
phant.

If the analytic sciences like chemistry revealed a path
that led the minds of men towards God, the wide-
ranged sciences like astronomy, astrobiology, and as-
tromagnetism might themselves be called the highways

Religion 685

to God. The embodied energy and life of the earth on
this side of death seem to the human mind self-explan-
atory and self- involved; but the enfranchised life and
energy that fill space have no human philosophy to
account for them and have generally been denied by
men. The L,imanoran sciences had found space, as far
as they could investigate it with their senses and their
instruments, no less full of energy and life than the
world itself, not merely the infinitesimal and attenuated
life that they thought the debris of other worlds and
systems, but the enfranchised life of highly organised
beings, most of it so subtle and noble as to evade even
the new senses of the L,imanorans. It was the life of
such beings that the science of this people aimed at
knowing intimately. On some stars, they were cer-
tain, existed inhabitants subtly enough organised to
cognise this interstellar life without aid of instruments;
and they seemed themselves to be on the verge of
attaining such a power. When they gained it, they
might hold intercourse with that disembodied energy
which perchance has close affinity with the soul of God.
Towards this higher, enfranchised energy they laboured
and struggled incessantly. They believed that its ex-
istence could be accounted for only on the assumption
of some perennial fountain of free energy in the cosmos;
that there must be some great centre of completely
enfranchised energy; the course of cosmic evolution
pointed that way, and every so-called death or dissolu-
tion was but the enfranchisement of some higher type
of energy from the lower forms with which it had been
for a time allied. Even the fixed nuclei of energy,
what were called matter and the atoms, were ever
aiming at liberation of the energy that formed their
essence. Every dissolution, every step higher in the

686 Limanora

gradation, implied an ultimate energy that was free
from all the trammels of lower forms. This must be the
life of pure thought that sees time past and time to be
as clearly as time present, that takes in the cosmos at
a glance, that needs no sustenance from lower energies,
and suffers no birth or dissolution. Towards this the
whole cosmos strives; and perhaps there may be a time
in the history of existence when all the fixed forms of
energy shall have evolved into the free form, till at last
there is nothing but space and disembodied thought
which is universally perceptive and creative without
the aid of mediums of energy or senses. Vast systems
of worlds have come and gone in the infinite past only
to distil the energy that was in them through living
beings up into the final and immortal form that needs
no process of dissolution or migration to purify it.

When they turned back from these heights to view
the history of the earth, it seemed to them that creative
thought was written all over it; could there be any
clearer manifestation of the vast intelligence informing
the whole than this marvellous elaboration of genus
and species raising terrestrial life step by step upwards
from the microbe to the highest type of man ? Their
astronomical sciences pointed still more unmistakably
upwards to the fountain of creative thought. The evo-
lution of stars and systems and of life upon them
seemed .to them but the history of the intelligence of
infinitude. They deliberately avoided all conventional
idea of the thought of the cosmos, yet were ever tempted
through desire of firm ground to use the analogy of
a living terrene thing. Just as the body of a plant
or animal is ever decaying, ever renewing itself, so is
this cosmos, the material existence, the body of the
spirit we call God, ever decaying, ever renewing itself,

Religion 687

ever raising its energies into higher and higher forms.
The universes and systems are molecules, the stars the
atoms, of the infinite body of the cosmos, and each one
of them is moving and developing in strict relation to
all the others and to the abiding spirit that is their aim
and master. There is law or thought guiding the his-
tory of every one of them and nothing of them is lost;
the energy of everything that seems to die has but dis-
tilled elsewhere, or transmuted into something higher
and less localised. What seems to us decay is but the
liberation of an energy from the less refined forms with
which it has been allied. Every process moves in
rhythm to the pulsations of everlasting thought that
is, and realises all that was and is and is to be. No-
thing falls by accident. All is transformation, growth,
development towards self-subsistent thought, which
moves through all the processes, conscious of itself
and of them all. To this final spirit of the cosmos ten
thousand ages are but as a moment. The myriads of
millions of years that some stars live, and that crush
our puny thoughts with their vastness, are but one
heartbeat of God. The whirling universes are but
molecules looked at from the view-point of the final
spirit; our telescopic is his microscopic.

Thitherwards all their astronomy pointed. Round
our sun move our planets without failure of harmony,
and ever round some still farther point moves our sun
and his satellites, as thousands of other suns and sys-
tems do. Nor did the epicycloidal movement cease
there; great systems of universes have still more inward
centres. But all this infinitude of concentricism points
to some ultimate centre which is again the pivot of the
cosmos. Following their analogy from man, they oc-
casionally allowed themselves to think that this was

688 Limanora

the brain of God, the concentration of His thought-
energy. But they refused to let the analogy master
them; they threw it off as but a metaphor and waited for
clearer and farther- reaching light. To define what lay
so far beyond their horizon was to falsify; and they
knew too well from their own past history into what
labyrinths of error a single untruth will lead a race,
especially if it is planted and watered by religion.

Only where science flashed its light forth into the
darkness would they dare to define any feature or form
of religion. God, they felt, was the infinite conserva-
tion of energy. Up an infinite scale it ever climbed
towards the ultimate, the purest of all energies, the
divine, the goal to which creation groaned and strug-
gled. The grosser forms of energy were the caput mor-
tuum of former mixed beings and worlds, after the
sublimation of their purest elements. Out of this
residue in its new period of probation were distilled
again energies that swept upwards. If such lapses
from the universal progress of the cosmos occur in self-
conscious forms, as in the soul of man, then are they
breaches of morality, or, from the point of view of the
all, sins. Conversion is the entrance of consciousness
of the universal law and of willing obedience to it into
the nature. Religious and moral codes are strivings
after it and, unfortunately, attempts to define it that
soon falsify its spirit. Miracles are fore-glimpses of this
law of progress half- understood, intrusions of an energy
loftier than the sect or circle or star has been accus-
tomed to. Every new faith is a miracle to its early be-
lievers; for it is a prevision of the universal law which
is so far beyond their natural powers that it surprises
them into enthusiasm; its miraculous quality makes

Religion 689

them accept it as the final revelation, and their de-
scendants, after they have advanced to a natural view
of its truths, still uphold the tradition that it is divine,
and strain every word and feature of it in order to find
the divine in it.

A pioneering book of the time attempted to point the
way of biological psychology towards the goal of re-
ligion. It showed how the plant has a dim sense of
its being moulded from without, chiefly by the grosser
forms of energy; and how the animal though subject
to them is yet capable of moving amongst them and re-
belling against their power; whilst the human is at-
tained when this rebellion rises into capacity to rule
them and mould them to its will. It emphasised the
Limauoran distinction between the grossly human and
the wisely human, and held that there were geological
ages of development lying between these; for the one
is conscious of the self as merely allied with the grosser
forms of energy like the animal; the mark of the other
is the consciousness of self as a part of the all, as allied
with the law of the all. It conceived that the next
grade was the divine, distinguished by consciousness
of the all as created and guided by the self. The wise
amongst men in its view had thus in them a share of the
divine. There was it is true in all men the possibility
of this, though in most it was latent. The loftiest kind
of energy they hajd yet discovered had as its distinction
the sense of continuity of existence, the power to think
back through the past and forward through the future;
this is perhaps what is meant by personal identity in
Western philosophy, the capacity to keep the self from
being merged in the mass of energies that fill space.
Men have attained it in but a fitful and shadowy way.
In savages arid in those of the civilised who fall away

690 Limanora

from the universal law of progress it is obscured or
buried by the dominance of the lower and transitory
forms of energy. The book imagined that when the
wise die this highest energy is so strong in them that
it cannot amalgamate again with those they have been
accustomed to upon earth; it seeks higher alliance and
higher spheres than it has hitherto known; and, once
having found its new and sublimer affinities, it can
move amid the grosser forms and elements untainted,
unsubdued, unrecognised, by them. Gravitation and
heat and electricity have no power over it and come
into relationship to it only when k wills to use them;
for they are the mediate forms of energy that move the
molecules and atoms; and they are moved and piloted
by still higher forms, that are perchance the will-power
or spirit of God; these higher forms come not yet
within the range of human senses, but are inferred by
human reason and conceived by human imagination
as conscious of themselves, evident everywhere by their
results, the marks of intelligence throughout the cos-
mos. But this book imagined that the disembodied
energy of the wise knew and felt them, and thus came
nearer to the spirit and fountain of all. Once our uni-
verse has distilled its best energies into space and has
accomplished the best it can, our swarm of firefly
worlds " paling their now ineffectual fires" encounter
in their natural epicycloidal course round unperceived
centres the systems that they have encountered myr-
iads of geological ages before; and the collision of the
two again sends them on their career of the evolution
of their lower energies into higher.

But the L,imanorans were chary of claiming anything
that they discovered or conceived as the ultimate or
the absolute; so many absolutes of the past had after a

Religion 691

time yielded points of view into infinities beyond them.
Hundreds of their scientific highroads led' manifestly
towards one centre; but they could not say that that
was the final centre or God. Just as their sun with its
satellites moved round another centre, which was itself
in revolution, so might the common point to which
their various sciences seemed to converge be but on the
outer rim of a series of sciences that had a still more in-
ward centre. Their highest faculties might have above
them faculties belonging to other beings in the cosmos
as superior to reason and imagination as reason and
imagination were to the sensuous perceptions of the
animals. The savage had no power to comprehend the
results of the reasoning capacities of the civilised man;
and the soul of the sage, when disembodied, might be-
gin to perceive the heights of development in faculty
he had still to climb. All their recent experience bade
them wait further light and refuse to accept any re-
velation of being as ultimate, and in the rejection of all
dogmatism they attained the true religious attitude for
imperfect seekers of knowledge like men, the attitude
of waiting for light. The book had embodied in it an
apologue that put this belief concretely.

If the parasite of a microbe in the body of a flea were
able to examine and analyse its conditions and sur-
roundings and had the faculty of reverence, its first
religion would have as its object the host on which it
battened, and would endow its deity with its own
parasitic faculties and desires. But as its horizon
widened and it found its host but the dependent of an-
other vital centre, it would contemn the mediacy of the
microbe, and fix all its reverence and adoration upon
the flea, which would seem to it a miraculous and om-
nipotent edition of itself. With its vision and all its

692 Limanora

powers of observation fixed upon the host of its host,
it would soon come to see how its deity was not self-
subsistent but ricochetted from spot to spot, and the
human body with its comparative infinitude would
afterwards take the place of the flea in the reverence of
the microbe's parasite, and be accepted as the vastest
and most etherealis.ed edition of itself the parasite could
conceive, having no means of ascertaining the real
limits and faculties of its new deity. As soon as it
was able to measure and define these, it would undeify
man and substitute for him that which man inhabited,
and endow it with all its own parasitic powers and
limitations.

Following the analogy, the new book saw an infin-
itude of pitfalls and disillusionments before the religious
faculty of man, and refused to accept man's similes and
metaphors as in any way accurate representations of
the truth. Similes and metaphors they must remain
marked .by all the narrowness of human limitations.
Scientific discovery must be the only guide of religion;
and the more they advanced in their sciences, the
nearer they came to the true God. For this reason it
was that they felt it to be sin to withdraw any portion
of their energy or time from scientific pursuits and in-
vestigations. To know the cosmos better was to ap-
proach nearer to the spirit of the cosmos, .to grow more
truly religious.

The last decennial review that I witnessed, occur-
ring as it did just before I set out over the circle of
mist, impressed upon me the provisional as well as the
fundamental character of their religious ideals. Most
of the books dramatically presented in Loomiefa at
that period had the final aim of cosmic life and energy
as their theme; to me they struck far beyond all that

Religion 693

the most idealistic of Western religious books had ever
attempted to foreshadow; and yet they were wholly
based upon the indications that recent discoveries had
given. In a still more startling way, they were taken
as but temporary satisfactions of futuritive yearnings;
they bent the highest energies of the lyimanorans into
paths that led beyond what they could see from their
actual standpoint in science; but they knew from past
experience that the full blaze of noon would before
long fall upon these dim regions now lit up only by
presciential imagination. These books they now re-
verenced for their pioneering power; but as soon as sci-
entific advance should wither them into the trite and
commonplace, nothing could ever make them again
guides into the darkness of the unknown, nothing in
short could ever restore their sacredness.

CHAPTER XIV

THK LAST FLIGHT

THOUGH this Manora seemed to me so solemn and
almost sacramental in its spirit, there was no
withdrawal of any of the families from the duties of
their daily life. They were as eager for the advance
of their special sciences as they had ever been. Nay,
the progress seemed to me more and more rapid. The
faculties were whetted to their utmost keenness; their
energies were buoyant and free. I had expected at
this religious review of the whole of their life to find
a relaxation of their intellectual temper, a languor in
their wills, such as I had often noted in periods of great
religious outburst in the West. I had been accustomed
to look for an aloofness from the common pursuits of
life and a prostration before the great ideals of faith,
whenever a wave of worshipful enthusiasm broke over
any community in Europe.

This people would have thought a religion that thus
blanched common life of its interests and enthusiasms
not merely useless but mischievous. Prostration be-
fore the infinities and eternities was the last attitude
they would encourage; for they considered it blas-
phemy against the spirit of the cosmos. If the Man-
ora had in any way withdrawn their energies from

694

The Last Flight 695

their forward march, they would have abolished it.
Progress was religion, or the fulfilment of the irrepress-
ible yearning of all things to rise in the cosmic scale
of being, and that anything religious should check or
obstruct advance was to them the grossest contradic-
tion in terms. Religion was in Umanora the essence
of practical life, or rather practical life was the highest
religion.

Though the review was an intense pleasure to the
whole nation, throwing the thought as it did farther
and farther into the future, none neglected for a mo-
ment the severe physical labour that was their daily
portion in the centre of force. None felt their spirits
relax in their eagerness to perform the work of their
life. On the contrary, the new religious enthusiasm
added a zest to all that they had to do.

To no families did so many or so urgent demands
come as to those of the L,eomo; for the great mountain
had been more than ordinarily perturbed. In spite of
numerous new lava-wells, the crust of the whole island
had been shaken by frequent earthquakes, and out of
the mouth of the crater had stormed far pennons of
dust and ashes, showing that something unusual was
occurring in the depths below. Then had come a sud-
den and ominous lull during the latter half of the Man-
ora; the earth had grown quiescent and the whole
summit of Umanora stood vivid and clear in the
azure.

The Leomo were not deceived by this sudden cessa-
tion of subterranean activity. It meant new issues for
the volcanic energy amid the antarctic snows, and new
dangers from the possible intrusion of southern waters.
Most members of the families were needed in the island
itself for the investigation of the new phenomena and

696 Limanora

the sinking of lava-wells, and only two could be spared
for an inspection of the volcanoes of their old home.
Thyriel and I were chosen to make the expedition.
For we had lately been accorded the high privilege of
marriage, and comradeship in danger was the usual
and natural welder of the new bonds. As soon as the
review was over we had to set forth on our venture,
and we were instructed to return with all the speed we
could manage.

We did not need such instructions; our own quick-
ened enthusiasms were incentive enough. We knew
that the reports by the idrovamolan of events occurring
so far to the south could not be wholly trusted; for
these regions were too often enveloped in mist or blind-
ing snowstorm, and it was difficult to float the observer
in the teeth of their furious winds and impossible to
send the telepathic line of light to such a distance.
Even if electric, aural, and visual records had been
gathered by means of the machine-reporters, they
would not have been minute enough for the purposes
of the Leomo. There was generally needed therefore
a personal inspection of the lands away to the south,
whenever there were unusual perturbations in the
great mountain and its precincts.

To have been selected for this difficult duty was
honour so great as to stir us to unwonted effort. A
few hours after the duty had been assigned us we had
everything on board pur faleena, and from the hill of
farewells we had started, full of eagerness to do our
best for our people. We were too happy in our new
comradeship and in our extraordinary task to allow
any sense of separation or fear of disaster to cloud our
thoughts. So anxious were we to be on our way that
we scarcely looked back at our companions and guard-

The Last Flight 697

ians, as they stood watching our flight after giving us
of their magnetism.

Nothing occurred to make the voyage south espe-
cially memorable. We did notice far below us in the
night one or two dark masses that were not identifiable
with anything in our maps. But we set them down as
great icebergs, borne out of their usual course; and the
cap they seemed to bear we took for a turban of mist
round their heads. From our later observation of the
southern lands, we afterwards judged that they were
temporary volcanic islands thrown up on the line of
shallow water by the renewed violence of the fires
below.

A great storm met us as we approached the ice- cliffs
of the Antarctic; nothing could be seen for the drift of
snow and hail through the air, and we were forced to
rise high into the atmosphere beyond the region of
winds and tempests and clouds. For days we could
see no break in the massed blackness below us. We
chafed at the delay but knew that it was inevitable;
for even if we could have landed in safety, we should
have been able to see nothing for the thickness of the
driving snowstorm, and we would assuredly have im-
perilled our faleena in attempting to come to earth in
the baffling winds.

At last we felt the magnetism of the upper atmo-
sphere lessen in force and caprice, and we knew that the
disturbances below would gradually vanish. The sun
seemed to gather power, and we saw the cloud-floor
rend like an ice-sheet on flooding waters. The fifth
morning broke brilliant and clear. There lay the
heaving surface of the ocean blue as the sky, and away
to the south gleamed on the horizon the knife-edge of
far-stretching ice. But there was something new and

698 Limanora

strange beyond it. Thick smoke trailed heavily above
it, and a dozen new points of light made it lurid.

We had drifted far to the north, and anxiously we
turned the prow of our airship towards the old home
of the race. We seemed to wing our way with inor-
dinate slowness, so eager were our spirits to know the
new phenomena and to carry the report back to L,ima-
nora. Every league nearer made us more certain that
some great disturbance had occurred in the crust of the
earth. The sea was covered with the debris of a world
of ice. Huge icebergs swam lazily breasting the swell,
or clashed against each other in splintering collision;
in some of them we could see the dark motes that
marked them as portions of the vast graveyard we had
once visited. Closer still to them we could see many
of the long-buried bodies emerging from their tombs
of frost, like Lazaruses still bound in their grave-
clothes. It was a strange sight, this phantom-like
resurrection at the touch of sunlight.

Over the unguided procession of icy funeral-barges,
bearing their century-sheeted dead to burial in the
ocean, we hurriedly winged to land. There were still
more striking sights in store for us. The appearance
of the cliffs and mountains had been completely
changed. It looked, as we approached, as if what had
formerly been a great plateau had been ridged and
furrowed by some titanic plough; and where a dozen
smoke-vents had once borne witness to the living fires
beneath, hundreds belched forth ashes or sent a red
tongue of molten lava oozing and licking down their
slopes.

We had to change our landing-place far to the west;
for dozens of miles had been added to the eruptive area
and the cliffs where we used to land were scarred by

The Last Flight 699

explosion or were tottering before the assaults of the
billows. The storm that we had encountered had evi-
dently been the companion, if not the result, of this
vast upheaval and at the same time had hidden from
us, as we hovered above the clouds, the titanic pyro-
techny.

We flew along the cliff-line, till we reached a region
that seemed untouched by the orgasm of the earth.
Our airship we piloted into a cleft or valley which, we
thought, could protect it from any showers of ashes or
torrents of lava that might approach. But to guard
against possible disaster, we adjusted our wings and
took with us as much of the minute stores of sustenance
as we could carry in our garments. We securely fast-
ened down the faleena, so that no storm might bear it
away; and then we rose into the air on our wings
above the smoke and steam that hung over this region.

It was with great difficulty and some danger that we
investigated the state of the land where the lava-wells
had been sunk. For the vents spat out great showers
of dust and ashes intermittently, and the pall of smoke
brushed this way and that as the light breeze rose and
fell. By dint of care and watchfulness we managed to
see most of the ridge-side that abutted on the ocean.
Its whole appearance had been changed. There was
not a sign of our old lava-wells. The side of one hill
had been blown away, and a torrent of melted snow
and ice raced down the ravine. Vents had been broken
out where there had been glacier or precipice or rocky
peak. But as yet none of the vents were low enough
to let the sea break over their lips. The worst of all
had not yet occurred.

We could not finish our investigation in the first day.
So we lay down in our faleena to sleep, as the brief

700 Limanora

darkness approached. We were well content with our
day's work; and we would have slept easily and well
but for the tremors in the earth beneath us. Its very
foundations seemed at times to shake and threaten con-
vulsion. Once we thought of taking to the air again
for safety, so billow-like were the movements that
tossed us as we lay.

However, morning broke without catastrophe, and
we were soon busy at our work of inspection. We flew
to the other side of the range of mountains in order to
note how the shores of the inland sea had borne the
effects of the commotion in the crust of the earth. At
first we seemed to see no change, but when we had left
our faleena and followed the old line of cliffs, the mag-
nitude of the disturbance impressed us. New preci-
pices stood beetling over the still waters, where we
remembered to have seen low shelving bays. We
searched for the old sections in which we had seen the
stratification of civilised abode; but the strange pal-
impsest of prehistoric history, a dozen times rewritten
by the toil and hope of man, had been again obliterated
by the finger of fire. A tongue of lava only just cool
had licked out the record of the dead ages. A tawny
glacis of rock confronted us instead of the panorama of
thousands of years.

Everywhere we flew were marks of the recent vol-
canic work; and not merely creative, but destructive.
Still farther off we found vast subsidences which had
suddenly unveiled the secrets of many geological
epochs. Some of them had been titanic in the abrupt-
ness and extent of their work; but the great ice-planes
and ice-harrows had been already smoothing and round-
ing or levelling the serrated or sharp edges. Only in
one new cliff did we see a repetition of the now hidden

The Last Flight 701

record. A bold hill had been cut through as by a
sword and here had evidently been built and over-
whelmed village after village; we could discern here
and there traces of their employments suddenly
abandoned, their looms and ploughs and anvils em-
balmed in rock; and once or twice the forms of the
workers, tragically surprised at their work by the
showers of ashes, showed empty and void, the living
tissues having fallen to dust leaving only the shell, like
the tunnel of a huge worm in the petrified debris. We
lingered over this open volume of human history longer
than we would have done had we been older and wiser,
so deeply did it touch the fountains of romance, and the
dimmer twilight of the brief antarctic night overtook
us before our task was done.

When we awoke at dawn, we resumed our investiga-
tions, only to find countless signs of renewed subter-
ranean energy. We hurried to the various points of
danger and discovered only too clearly that the first
storm would send the waters of the ocean breaching
into many new volcanic vents. We could have no
hesitance as to the conclusion to be drawn and the next
steps to take. It would be impossible for us, unpro-
vided as we were with instruments and engines, to
guard against the threatening catastrophe. The best
we could do would be to return with all swiftness to
Limanora and warn the elders of our family. Per-
chance we should be able to anticipate the approach of
any tempest; and if temporary measures were taken,
the coming winter might stop the gaping mouths of
ruin with her downward-creeping glaciers.

We hastened back to the slope on which we had left
our faleena. Even at a distance, as we swept down
from aloft, we began to be troubled at the changes in

702 Limanora

the landscape. Where there had been a great ice-cap
crowning a precipitous ridge, there was a gaping
chasm; rock and incrustation had been together blown
to atoms. A new smoking cone was brushing the
azure with its cloud of dust; and, as we descended, we
found its streams of lava still licking and hissing their
way through the snow and ice that clothed its feet.

We recognised the features of the locality with diffi-
culty, and it was long before we fixed the valley in
which we had left our airship. Still we could see no
trace of our trusty faleena; it had vanished. After
long search we came to the conclusion that it had been
swept on by a billow of molten rock and overwhelmed,
and the realisation of the calamity cast me despairing
to the ground.

How different it was with Thyriel, I perceived, as
soon as my dismay allowed me to rouse my conscious-
ness from its palsy. She was exploring the edges of
the tongue of fire; and up the side of the opposing hill
she found a section of our flight-car unmelted by the
heat, broken off by a bold jut of rock and left scarred
by the fire and twisted by the force of the sea of lava,
yet recognisable in its outlines. Happily it was the
part that contained our store of sustenance and all our
equipments for a long wing-voyage, spare chest-and-
shoulder engines and the apparatus necessary for sup-
plying them with electricity from the air.

We did not encumber ourselves with more than we
thought would be essential for the long air-journey
back to Riallaro. The minute pellets of sustenance
were easily disposed of. But it puzzled us to know
what to do with the additional apparatus for so pro-
tracted a voyage. My powers of flight were still so
crude and undeveloped and my locomotion through

The Last Flight 703

the air so clumsy and slow that Thyriel had to carry
both hers and mine. I was greatly perturbed over the
possible result of so dangerous a venture. But it had
to be undertaken, and she had buoyancy and exhilara-
tion enough for both. My sinking heart felt the in-
fluence of her magnetism, and I gained confidence after
we set out.

The first half of our voyage was marked by singular
good fortune. The breeze went with us every day, and
at night, or when the muscles of my legs and arms grew
numb from fatigue, we sighted an iceberg and rested
on it; though it heaved and rocked and on occasion
threatened submersion, our minds were at rest, for we
had our wings always attached and everything in
readiness to sweep upwards from our perch.

The difficulty came when we passed beyond the
Antarctic Ocean, and voyaged high above that heav-
ing trackless desert of water which lies between the
region of icebergs and the first ring of islets that
stipple the tropical seas. How were we to find rest-
ing-places at night or during the day, when my wing-
achievements grew lame and tardy ? Even Thyriel's
heart sank, as she thought of the hundreds of leagues
we had to traverse unbroken by any sign of land.

At first she kept along the immemorial line of bird-
travel from the south on the chance of finding here
and there some spot of land thrown up by the growing
disturbances beneath the sea. For some days we were
fortunate enough to find a nightly perching-place
above the billows upon the temporary vents of the sub-
marine fires, dangerous it is true, yet with care and
watching safe. Then we came upon a zone of calm
water, so strangely still and free from the action of
wind and current that the albatrosses basked moveless

704 Limanora

upon it. Here Thy tiel .bound our wings together and
made a raft, on which we floated as we slept.

But that was only for two revolutions of the earth
and was the prelude to a tornado from the north-east,
a wind so unusual in those latitudes that the Liina-
norans never take it into the calculations of their voy-
ages through the air. Just when we were within three
days' wing-journey of our home the tempest began and
brought us almost to a standstill. We tried to battle
against it but our efforts were vain. Then we rose,
according to Limanoran custom, into the higher atmo-
sphere where is usually found perfect calm and perfect
freedom from cloud and storm, but the fury of the dis-
turbance seemed to be miles deep. The upper air was
as thick and turbulent as the lower.

Our troubles culminated in disaster to my wing-ap-
pendages. I was never expert in their management,
but in the baffling storm I grew helpless and in my de-
spair let them beat almost unguided. The result was
irreparable injury to the left wing and such an obstruc-
tion to the movement of the right as made it unman-
ageable. I felt my heart sink ; for I saw that I must
soon fall into the ocean below and be dashed to pieces
or drowned.

Thyriel looked down and saw my peril. In a flash
of thought she abandoned all she carried except her
chest-and-shoulder engines, and, swooping down to-
wards me, caught me as I fell. An upward sweep of
the wind aided her in her efforts, and she buoyed me
up till I had recovered energy and heart. Then she
told me what she meant to do. For a time I would not
be persuaded and prayed that I might be abandoned to
my fate, but she would not hear of such a thing. By
the force of her will I soon gave way and nestled, as I

The Last Flight 705

had often done when learning to fly, in the hollow be-
tween her wings.

Before the storm she let herself go; and I could feel
we were moving almost as swiftly as if we had been in
our own faleena. It was useless for her, she showed
me, to fight against the wind, especially after she had
thrown away the apparatus for quickly renewing the
power of her engines. After a time I saw how much
she laboured under her burden, and I sent promptly
into the gulf beneath all that I had carried, my broken
wings, my engines, and my stores of sustenance. I
felt that her spirit protested; but she said nothing, and
I was relieved to feel that we were rising instead of
falling. She grew more buoyant and was even able to
spare magnetism enough to put heart into me.

The course she had taken so promptly was the only
one that could have saved both of us. She might have
weathered the storm alone, and then found her way
back to Limanora. But as it was she knew that the
tempest would bear us, if she could keep us both high
above the earth, right across the long narrow cloud of
New Zealand.

She felt by her bodily magnetism that we were ap-
proaching it, and while it was still daylight we came
within reach of it. She, seeing that we were evidently
coasting its southern shores, but too far off to make
them with her exhausted powers, grew afraid that
we would be blown far off to the south again and thus
miss our resting-place; for we could see the coasts round
northwards. Happily at this juncture the wind sud-
denly veered round to the south-west, and we were
swept before it in the twilight into a deep fiord. Our
hearts were glad to feel that soon we should touch the
earth and rest. I was tempestuously elated; for I felt,

45

;o6 Limanora

by the beat of her heart and the quick short breaths
she drew, that she was near the end of her powers.

We were close to a precipice and I was eagerly pre-
paring to leap from her back, when she seemed sud-
denly to collapse. I fell through the air, and then
knew no more till I awakened in your hut. What be-
came of Thyriel puzzled me for long. But I am per-
suaded that after seeing me drawn by you safely to
land she went off before the favouring wind towards
L,imanora for help. That she has been so long troubles
my thoughts deeply at times. But I believe that she
will return for me, if only I rest here long enough. I
dare not leave the place long, lest she should come in
my absence. And the solitude and your gentle silence
soothe me in my weary meditation.

EPILOGUE

WE felt guiltily conscious, as he came to this close
of his narrative. But we had not the heart to
hint what we thought might have become of her.

Almost three years had passed before his narrative
reached the point of contact with our lives. He now be-
came restless and jaded and flitted in and out amongst
us like a ghost. For days he vanished in the bush,
and again and again we thought he had finally disap-
peared. But he ever returned, more restless and yet
more gentle.

We could not bear to see his agony and yearning,
and at last proposed that we should hire or pur-
chase a small steamer, and under his guidance make
for Riallaro. He was long reluctant, but after months
of hope deferred resigned himself to the enterprise.

Trowm and I made for the nearest port and brought
our purchase round to our fiord, well-provisioned and
equipped for a tropical voyage. Somm was left by our
huts and our mine to guard our interests, but still more
to watch for the advent of any messenger from the
strange land within the circle of mist.

The rest of us set out with our guest in search of his
home. Nothing happened to our expedition beyond
the usual mishaps of tropical seas. A tornado made
us take refuge within an uninhabited atoll; in its

707

7°8 Limanora

harbour our craft was safe enough, but it took all our
powers to hold on to the scanty herbage that clung to
the reef and prevent our being blown into the ocean
beyond. Once or twice we had an awkward incident
with sharks, and once we came too close to an island
whose shore swarmed with threatening savages. They
sprang into their canoes and made for us, but our
steam enabled us to outdistance them with ease.

Our stranger knew the exact latitude and longitude
of Riallaro. He could point out its place on a map
with a confidence that made us feel we were about to
enter with him into the mysterious archipelago. We
sailed straight for the western side of the ring of mist,
but never did we encounter any such feature as he had
described to us. Once or twice we thought we saw an
extended haze on the horizon and made for it; but it
vanished as we approache'd ; it was only the mirage of
the ocean. Weeks and weeks we steamed around and
over the region, but not a trace of the great archi-
pelago or its nebulous fence did we find.

Even our guide at last fell into silent bewilderment.
He could not believe that it had all disappeared like a
dream; unless, as we fancied, the subterranean forces
had blown it into space. Nor could he mistrust his
senses or his knowledge. What to think of it he did
not venture to decide. He lay in stupor and silence
for days.

But we knew that within a few weeks began the
season of hurricanes; and we determined to make back
for our shelter in the southern fiord. He reluctantly
consented to our persuasion, after making us promise
that we should return again to search for his lost para-
dise. In the meantime he would be able to study the
charts of the region, and define the knowledge of it

Epilogue 7°9

more exactly. He knew by heart its relations to the
sun and the stars; and with study he could tell the
very place where to follow our search. As it was, he
had doubtless made some mistake; and he would rectify
it in the interval of rest.

Without mishap or obstructive weather we got back
into the shadow of our mountains; and one day of bril-
liant sunshine we sailed into the fiord. Somm was on
the shore to welcome us. He had no news to give.
No one had been near the place since we had left. But
he had had to make into a neighbouring sound in order
to supply his empty larder, and as the wind seemed to
favour his trip, he had brought the masts and sails of
our boat out of our cave.

Our guest paced up to our hut as in a dream, seem-
ing to hear and see nothing around him. We let him
find his way alone, whilst we beached and dismantled
our little steamer.

In our bustle of work we had forgotten him. Sud-
denly a strange, scarcely human cry awakened our at-
tention. We rushed up the steep pathway and found
him lying in trance by the mouth of the cave, stretched
upon the wings that we had cast into our lumber-hole
when we rescued him from the water. Somm had had
to turn them out to get at the sails and cordage of the
boat, and had forgotten to return them to their place.
They were cobwebbed and covered with lichen and
mould, yet the transparency of them in spots gathered
the rays of the sun upon the herbage underneath.

We raised him from his resting-place and carried him
into our spare hut. There we tried to bring him back
to consciousness, but our efforts were vain. There was
life in him, we were certain; yet there was scarce) v a
sign of it in movement or breath, only a fragment of

7io Limanora

the wings held to the mouth showed a trace of moisture.
So we left him for the night, remembering that it was
long before he recovered from the first trance in which
we had found him. We wrapped him round with
warm clothing, and placing him comfortably on a soft
bed of fern put food and drink near him, so that, if he
wakened, he should know we had thought of him and
were near.

The next morning at daybreak I rose, and the inci-
dent of the previous evening rushed into my mind. I
made for the hut, expecting to find him recovered and
asleep, but I found no human being there. The wrap-
pings had fallen on either side of the fern-lair. The
bowls of meat and drink were almost empty; but there
were evident marks of the claws and beaks of birds in
them.

We searched for him in the bush for days, but we
never found track of him. The only sign of his move-
ments was that the wings were gone. Whether he had
adjusted them to his body and flown into the air or
buried them in the sea we could not discover. There
clings to our thoughts the fancy that he faded away
into the azure under the blow of assurance that Thyriel
was gone for ever. We kept our eyes on the alert for
years after, as we went prospecting through the forest;
and slowly the thought lurking in our minds passed
into assured belief that his ethereal texture had melted
into the air at death, that the earth received none of
his material atoms when his energy fled from its
surface.

It is only now, when we are sure that he has gone
from our orb, that we venture on giving his story to
the rest of mankind. We know no better memorial to
him, and no better form for our gratitude than to let

Epilogue

711

others know what he gave us, to let others feel what
has passed into our own lives as an imperishable
memory.

GODFREY SWEVEN.

THE END.

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